Classic approaches to word learning emphasize referential ambiguity: In naming situations,
a novel word could refer to many possible objects, properties, actions, and so forth. To solve …

We evaluate here the performance of four models of cross‐situational word learning: two
global models, which extract and retain multiple referential alternatives from each word …

We report three eyetracking experiments that examine the learning procedure used by
adults as they pair novel words and visually presented referents over a sequence of …

Cross‐situational learning is a mechanism for learning the meaning of words across multiple
exposures, despite exposure‐by‐exposure uncertainty as to the word's true meaning. We …

Young children are so adept at learning words that they often learn an object name from
hearing a single object named. For example, a 2-year-old who sees a tractor for the first time …

People can learn word–referent pairs over a short series of individually ambiguous
situations containing multiple words and referents (Yu & Smith, 2007, Cognition 106: 1558 …

Children improve at word learning during the 2nd year of life—sometimes dramatically. This
fact has suggested a change in mechanism, from associative learning to a more referential …

Word learning is a “chicken and egg” problem. If a child could understand speakers'
utterances, it would be easy to learn the meanings of individual words, and once a child …

A critical question about the nature of human learning is whether it is an all-or-none or a
gradual, accumulative process. Associative and statistical theories of word learning rely …

There are an infinite number of possible word-to-world pairings. One way children could
learn words at an early stage is by computing statistical regularities across different …