Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A fundamental question in word learning is how, given onlyevidence about what objects a word has previously referred to,children are able to generalize the total class (Smith & Medin,1981; Xu & Tenenbaum, 2007). E.g. how a child ends upknowing that ‘poodle’ only picks out a specific subset of dogsrather than the whole class and vice versa. The Na ̈ıve Gen-eralization Model (NGM) presented in this paper offers an ex-planation of word learning phenomena grounded in categoryformation (Smith & Medin, 1981) The NGM captures a rangeof relevant experimental findings (Xu & Tenenbaum, 2007;Spencer, Perone, Smith, & Samuelson, 2011), including thosewhich are in conflict with a Bayesian inference theory (Xu &Tenenbaum, 2007).