{"pk":26451,"title":"The Interaction of Memory and Attention in Novel Word Generalization:A Computational Investigation","subtitle":null,"abstract":"People exhibit a tendency to generalize a novel noun to thebasic-level of a hierarchical taxonomy – a cognitively salientcategory such as “dog” – with the degree of generalization de-pending on the number and type of exemplars. Recently, achange in the presentation timing of exemplars has also beenshown to have an effect, surprisingly reversing the prior ob-served pattern of basic-level generalization. We explore theprecise mechanisms that could lead to such behavior by ex-tending a computational model of word learning and word gen-eralization to integrate cognitive processes of memory and at-tention. Our results show that the interaction of forgetting andattention to novelty, as well as sensitivity to both type and to-ken frequencies of exemplars, enables the model to replicatethe empirical results from different presentation timings. Ourresults reinforce the need to incorporate general cognitive pro-cesses within word learning models to better understand therange of observed behaviors in vocabulary acquisition.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"novel word generalization; word learning; compu-tational modeling"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6gg364g9","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Erin","middle_name":"","last_name":"Grant","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Toronto","department":""},{"first_name":"Aida","middle_name":"","last_name":"Nematzadeh","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Toronto","department":""},{"first_name":"Suzanne","middle_name":"","last_name":"Stevenson","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Toronto","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2016-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26451/galley/16087/download/"}]}