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Infants begin learning the visual referents of nouns before their first birthday. Despite considerable empirical and theoretical effort, little is known about the statistics of the experiences that enable infants to break into object–name learning. We used wearable sensors to collect infant experiences of visual objects and their heard names for 40 early-learned categories. The analyzed data were from one context that occurs multiple times a day and includes objects with early-learned names: mealtime. The statistics reveal two distinct timescales of experience. At the timescale of many mealtime episodes ( n = 87), the visual categories were pervasively present, but naming of the objects in each of those categories was very rare. At the timescale of single mealtime episodes, names and referents did cooccur, but each name–referent pair appeared in very few of the mealtime episodes. The statistics are consistent with incremental learning of visual categories across many episodes and the rapid learning of name–object mappings within individual episodes. The two timescales are also consistent with a known cortical learning mechanism for one-episode learning of associations: new information, the heard name, is incorporated into well-established memories, the seen object category, when the new information cooccurs with the reactivation of that slowly established memory.
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Discourse with few words: Coherence statistics, parent-infant actions on objects, and object names
Early object name learning is often conceptualized as a problem of mapping heard names to referents. However, infants do not hear object names as discrete events but rather in extended interactions organized around goal-directed actions on objects. The present study examined the statistical structure of the nonlinguistic events that surround parent naming of objects. Parents and 12-month-old infants were left alone in a room for 10 minutes with 32 objects available for exploration. Parent and infant handling of objects and parent naming of objects were coded. The four measured statistics were from measures used in the study of coherent discourse: (i) a frequency distribution in which actions were frequently directed to a few objects and more rarely to other objects; (ii) repeated returns to the high-frequency objects over the 10- minute play period; (iii) clustered repetitions and continuity of actions on objects; and (iv) structured networks of transitions among objects in play that connected all the played-with objects. Parent naming was infre- quent but related to the statistics of object-directed actions. The impli- cations of the discourse-like stream of actions are discussed in terms of learning mechanisms that could support rapid learning of object names from relatively few name-object co-occurrences.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1842817
- PAR ID:
- 10346413
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Language Acquisition
- ISSN:
- 1048-9223
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 19
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Actions in the world elicit data for learning and do so in a stream of interconnected events. Here, we provide evidence on how toddlers with their parent sample information by acting on toys during exploratory play. We observed 10 min of free-flowing and unconstrained object exploration of by toddlers (mean age 21 months) and parents in a room with many available objects ( n = 32). Borrowing concepts and measures from the study of narratives, we found that the toy selections are not a string of unrelated events but exhibit a suite of what we call coherence statistics: Zipfian distributions, burstiness and a network structure. We discuss the transient memory processes that underlie the moment-to-moment toy selections that create this coherence and the role of these statistics in the development of abstract and generalizable systems of knowledge. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences’.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1080/10489223.2022.2054342
