How Do Kids Figure Out What Words Mean? New Computer Model Has Answers

Scientists are continually discovering more about how we pick up language from the earliest ages, and a new study looks specifically at how very young children integrate different sources of information to learn new words.

Those sources can be everything from whether or not they've seen an object before (which points to whether or not it has a name they've heard before) to what they might be chatting about with someone when a new word is introduced.

To figure out more about how these sources are combined, researchers put together a cognitive model, proposing a social inference approach where children use all the available information in front of them to infer the identity of a given object.

"You can think of this model as a little computer program," says developmental psychologist Michael Henry Tessler from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). "We input children's sensitivity to different information, which we measure in separate experiments, and then the program simulates what should happen if those information sources are combined in a rational way."

"The model spits out predictions for what should happen in hypothetical new situations in which these information sources are all available."

The theoretical system researchers developed was informed by previous research in philosophy, developmental psychology, and linguistics. Data were also gathered from tests carried out with 148 kids aged between 2-5 years old to assess their sensitivity to different sources of information. The data were then plugged into the model.

Read Full Aritcle at: https://www.sciencealert.com/new-model-may-give-us-a-better-idea-of-how-kids-pick-up-new-words