CNL Lunch Talks

Justin Halberda

Thursday March 9th 2006, 12:30 PM, 3416 Marie Mount Hall

A Synthesis of Logical Reasoning and Word-Learning Abilities in Children and Adults

Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences

Johns Hopkins University

Many authors have argued that word-learning constraints help guide a word-learner's hypotheses as to the meaning of a newly heard word. One such class of constraints derives from the observation that word-learners of all ages prefer to map novel labels to novel objects in situations of referential ambiguity. In this talk I use eye-tracking to document the mental computations that support this word-learning strategy. Patterns of eye-movements to potential referents and participants' reaction time to point to novel referents supports the hypothesis that the logical argument structure Disjunctive Syllogism (i.e. process-of-elimination) is the basis for motivating the mapping of novel labels to novel objects for both children and adults. In this talk I present evidence that Disjunctive Syllogism supports word-learning, that it is domain general by the age of 2.5 years, and that children may develop from treating words associatively to treating them symbolically.