{"pk":28513,"title":"How do infants start learning object names in a sea of clutter?","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Infants are powerful learners. A large corpus of experimental\nparadigms demonstrate that infants readily learn distributional\ncues of name-object co-occurrences. But infants’ natural\nlearning environment is cluttered: every heard word has\nmultiple competing referents in view. Here we ask how infants\nstart learning name-object co-occurrences in naturalistic\nlearning environments that are cluttered and where there is\nmuch visual ambiguity. The framework presented in this paper\nintegrates a naturalistic behavioral study and an application of\na machine learning model. Our behavioral findings suggest\nthat in order to start learning object names, infants and their\nparents consistently select a set of a few objects to play with\nduring a set amount of time. What emerges is a frequency\ndistribution of a few toys that approximates a Zipfian\nfrequency distribution of objects for learning. We find that a\nmachine learning model trained with a Zipf-like distribution of\nthese object images outperformed the model trained with a\nuniform distribution. Overall, these findings suggest that to\novercome referential ambiguity in clutter, infants may be\nselecting just a few toys allowing them to learn many\ndistributional cues about a few name-object pairs.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"infancy; early word learning; machine learning;\nZipfian distribution."}],"section":"Papers with Oral Presentations","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/90s8m2jd","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Hadar","middle_name":"Karmazyn","last_name":"Raz","name_suffix":"","institution":"Indiana University","department":""},{"first_name":"Drew","middle_name":"H.","last_name":"Abney","name_suffix":"","institution":"Indiana University","department":""},{"first_name":"David","middle_name":"","last_name":"Crandall","name_suffix":"","institution":"Indiana University","department":""},{"first_name":"Chen","middle_name":"","last_name":"Yu","name_suffix":"","institution":"Indiana University","department":""},{"first_name":"Linda","middle_name":"B.","last_name":"Smith","name_suffix":"","institution":"Indiana University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2019-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28513/galley/18384/download/"}]}