Abstract
We incorporate social reasoning about groups of informants into a model of word learning, and show that the model accounts for infant looking behavior in tasks of both word learning and recognition. Simulation 1 models an experiment where 16-month-old infants saw familiar objects labeled either correctly or incorrectly, by either adults or audio talkers. Simulation 2 reinterprets puzzling data from the Switch task, an audiovisual habituation procedure wherein infants are tested on familiarized associations between novel objects and labels. Eight-month-olds outperform 14-month-olds on the Switch task when required to distinguish labels that are minimal pairs (e.g., “buk” and “puk”), but 14-month-olds' performance is improved by habituation stimuli featuring multiple talkers. Our modeling results support the hypothesis that beliefs about knowledgeability and group membership guide infant looking behavior in both tasks. These results show that social and linguistic development interact in non-trivial ways, and that social categorization findings in developmental psychology could have substantial implications for understanding linguistic development in realistic settings where talkers vary according to observable features correlated with social groupings, including linguistic, ethnic, and gendered groups.
Highlights
Common wisdom among adults when listening to speech is to “consider the source.” The identity of a speaker can provide a wealth of context in interpreting a speech act
In modeling looking times in the Switch task, we assume that increased certainty about the label, C, is expected to correlate with increased looking to the target image on switch trials, as a result of infants being more surprised at the novel label
We demonstrate that the pattern of results can be interpreted as evidence of social inference in word learning
Summary
Common wisdom among adults when listening to speech is to “consider the source.” The identity of a speaker can provide a wealth of context in interpreting a speech act. The epistemic trust model presented here accounts for infant behavior in response to social agents of varying perceived reliability, allowing us to pose questions about the role learners’ non-linguistic perception of identity plays in the speech perception task. Supposing that the learner must perceive some nominal social significance in the variation they acquire allows our model to describe listeners as making distinctions between talkers on the basis of their speech behavior This framework extends the definition of the language acquisition task to necessarily incorporate processes of person perception, which are predicted to have cascading effects on listeners’ attention to both linguistic and non-linguistic behaviors. The model can predict that learners will exhibit metalinguistic judgements regarding the relative quality of an informant’s speech behaviors, reserving the most scrutiny for informants belonging to groups which are believed knowledgeable
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