How Children Learn the Meanings of Words

By Maria Teresa Guasti. 2010

Subfields: Cognitive Science & Psychology, Linguistics

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Citations in the corpus

Experience Grounds Language (2020, background): “What “lame” means in terms of discriminative information is always at question: it can be defined as “undesirable,” but what it tells one about the processes operating in the environment requires social context to determine (Bloom, 2002).”
Few-Shot Image Recognition by Predicting Parameters from Activations (2017, background): “In contrast, children are known to be able to learn novel visual concepts almost effortlessly with a few examples after they have accumulated enough past knowledge [6].”
Learning Like a Child: Fast Novel Visual Concept Learning from Sentence Descriptions of Images (2015, background): “In particular, it is known that children can form quick and rough hypotheses about the meaning of new words in a sentence based on their knowledge of previous learned words [5, 21], associate these words to the objects or their properties, and describe novel concepts using sentences with the new wor”
Cognitive Science in the era of Artificial Intelligence: A roadmap for reverse-engineering the infant language-learner (2016, neutral): “he popular hypothesis that acquiring the meaning of words is essentially a problem of associating word form to referents in the outside world (or to conceptual representations of these referents; see Bloom, 2000 for possible learning mechanisms). Under such a view, it would seem impossible to learn ”
Predicting the birth of a spoken word (2015, background): “Less commonly discussed is the decline we observe in growth rate; it has been suggested this decline may signify a transition into a different learning “stage” (37) or a statistical sampling artifact (1), although the scale and density of the Human Speechome Project corpus mitigates sampling issues.”
Strong systematicity through sensorimotor conceptual grounding: an unsupervised, developmental approach to connectionist sentence processing (2012, unknown): “…theyounginfant(e.g. EimasandQuinn1994)maymakethehandfulofnounsandverbsthey haveacquiredbyage2(e.g. Nelson1973)seemfarmoresimilarthanweretheirmentallexicon tocontaintheestimated60,000wordsofanaverageyoungadult(Bloom2000).”
Object Naming and Later Lexical Development: From Baby Bottle to Beer Bottle. (2008, background): “Bloom (2000, 2001) has even suggested that it is not interesting from the perspective of understanding language learning to study the evolution of such word meanings past initial acquisition, because the process reflects only conceptual development.”
Learning to Connect Language and Perception (2008, methodology): “A few initial approaches to handling such referential uncertainty or ambiguous training data have been proposed (Siskind 1996; Kate & Mooney 2007); however, methods are needed that exploit more clues and constraints, such as those studied in psychological research on child language acquisition (Bloo”
A Developmental Approach to Machine Learning? (2017, background): “Object name learning begins very slowly prior to the ﬁrst birthday, with children’s knowledge of individual object names growing incrementally and initially characterized by errors (e.g., MacNamara, 1982; Mervis et al., 1992, see also Bloom, 2000).”
Towards more human-like concept learning in machines : compositionality, causality, and learning-to-learn (2014, background): “” Children are the most practiced concept learners, acquiring an estimated ten new words per day from the age of one through high school (Bloom, 2000).”
Vokenization: Improving Language Understanding via Contextualized, Visually-Grounded Supervision (2020, methodology): “In this paper, we introduce the visuallysupervised language model that simulates human language learning with visual pointing (Bloom, 2002).”
PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE Research Article Using Speakers ’ Referential Intentions to Model Early Cross-Situational Word Learning (unknown): “…of the goals and intentions of speakers and assume that—at least in the case of object nouns—once the child understands what is being talked about, the mappings between words and referents are relatively easy to learn (St. Augustine, 397/1963; Baldwin, 1993; Bloom, 2002; Tomasello, 2003).”
Revisiting the Evaluation of Theory of Mind through Question Answering (2019, background): “Inferring other people’s mental state is a crucial component of cognitive development, playing a role in how humans learn the meaning of words (Bloom, 2002), distinguish beliefs from reality (Gopnik and Astington, 1988), predict people’s behavior (Wimmer and Perner, 1983), understand what others…”
Beyond Fast Mapping (2010, background): “Markson and Bloom (1997) extended to noun representations the finding that a newly formed lexical entry, along with a representation that at least partially specifies its referent, persists for 6 Carey Page 3”
The Centrality of Language in Human Cognition (2016, background): “While this passage is unusual in being so explicit, it represents a fairly widespread view (Bloom, 2002; E. V. Clark, 2004; Pinker, 1994; Waxman & Gelman, 2009).”
Real-world visual statistics and infants' first-learned object names (2017, background): “For any heard word, there are many potential referents, and thus within any learning moment, there is much uncertainty as to the relevant scene elements for determining the meaning of an unknown word [1,2].”
A Probabilistic Computational Model of Cross-Situational Word Learning (2010, background): “For example, Carpenter, Nagell, Tomasello, Butterworth, and Moore (1998) and Bloom (2000) argue that children use their (innate or acquired) social skills to infer the referent of a word as intended by a speaker.”
Human few-shot learning of compositional instructions (2019, background): “Asking subjects to associate new words or sentences with visual referents is a standard practice in psycholinguistics (e.g., Bloom, 2000; Wonnacott, Boyd, Thomson, & Goldberg, 2012, and references there).”