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{
    "pk": 26877,
    "title": "Quantifying the impact of active choice in word learning",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "Past theoretical studies on word learning have offeredsimple sampling models as a means of explaining realword learning, with a particular goal of addressing thespeed of word learning: people learn tens of thousandsof words within their first 18 years. The present studyrevisits past theoretical claims by considering a more re-alistic word frequency distribution in which a large num-ber of words are sampled with extremely small probabil-ities (e.g., according to Zipf’s law). Our new mathemati-cal analysis of a recently-proposed simple learning modelsuggests that the model is unable to account for wordlearning in feasible time when the distribution of wordfrequency is Zipfian (i.e., power-law distributed). Toameliorate the difficulty of learning real-world word fre-quency distributions, we consider a type of active, self-directed learning in which the learner can influence theconstruction of contexts from which they learn words.We show that active learners who choose optimal learn-ing situations can learn words hundreds of times fasterthan passive learners faced with randomly-sampled situ-ations. Thus, in agreement with past empirical studies,we find theoretical support for the idea that statisticalstructure in real-world situations–potentially structuredfor learning by both a self-directed learner, and by abeneficent teacher–is a potential remedy for the patho-logical case of learning words with Zipf-distributed fre-quency.",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "",
        "short_name": "",
        "text": null,
        "url": ""
    },
    "keywords": [
        {
            "word": "cognitive models of language acquisition;cross-situational word learning; statistical learning"
        }
    ],
    "section": "Talks: Papers",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/17j2k9kp",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Shohei",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Hidaka",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Takuma",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Torii",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "George",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Kachergis",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Radboud University",
            "department": ""
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": null,
    "date_accepted": null,
    "date_published": "2017-01-01T18:00:00Z",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "PDF",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26877/galley/16513/download/"
        }
    ]
}