Developmental and Statistical Models of early word learning

Previous work on early language acquisition has shown that word meanings can be acquired by an associative procedure that maps perceptual experience onto linguistic labels based on cross-situational observation. A new trend termed social-pragmatic theory focuses on the effect of the child's social-cognitive capacities, such as joint attention and intention reading. We argue that statistical and social cues can be seamlessly integrated to facilitate early word learning. To support this idea, we first introduce a statistical learning mechanism that provides a formal account of cross-situational observation. The main part of this work focuses on a unified model that is able to make use of different kinds of social cues, such as joint attention and prosody in maternal speech, in the statistical learning framework. In a computational analysis of infant data, the quantitative results of our unified model outperforms the purely statistical learning method in computing word-meaning associations.