{"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/"}]}