Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How do children learn the typical features of objects in theworld? For many objects, this information must come from thelanguage they hear. However, language does not veridicallyreflect the world: People are more likely to talk about atypicalfeatures (e.g., “purple carrot”) than typical features (e.g., “or-ange carrot”). Does the speech children hear from their parentsalso overrepresent atypical features? We examined the typical-ity of adjectives produced by parents in a large, longitudinalcorpus of parent-child interaction. Across nearly 2000 uniqueadjective–noun pairs, we found parents’ adjectives predomi-nantly mark atypical features of objects, although parents ofvery young children are relatively more likely to comment ontypical features as well. We then used vector space models toshow that learning the typical features of common categoriesfrom linguistic input alone is challenging even with sophisti-cated statistical inference techniques.