Learning semantic knowledge based on infant real-time

Yang, J., Zhang, Y., & Yu, C. (2024). Learning semantic knowledge based on infant real-time. In L. K. Samuelson, S. L. Frank, M. Toneva, A. Mackey, & E. Hazeltine (Eds.), Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2024) (pp. 741-747).
Early word learning involves mapping individual words to their meanings and building organized semantic representations among words. Previous corpus-based studies (e.g., using text from websites, newspapers, child-directed speech corpora) demonstrated that linguistic information such as word co-occurrence alone is sufficient to build semantically organized word knowledge. The present study explored two new research directions to advance understanding of how infants acquire semantically organized word knowledge. First, infants in the real world hear words surrounded by contextual information. Going beyond inferring semantic knowledge merely from language input, we examined the role of extra-linguistic contextual information in learning semantic knowledge. Second, previous research relies on large amounts of linguistic data to demonstrate in-principle learning, which is unrealistic compared with the input children receive. Here, we showed that incorporating extra-linguistic information provides an efficient mechanism through which semantic knowledge can be acquired with a small amount of data infants perceive in everyday learning contexts, such as toy play.
Additional information
link to eScholarship
Publication type
Proceedings paper
Publication date
2024

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