Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

n order for children to understand and reason about the worldin a mature fashion, they need to learn that conceptual cate-gories are organized in a hierarchical fashion (e.g., a dog isalso an animal). The caregiver linguistic input can play an im-portant role in this learning, and previous studies have doc-umented several cues in parental talk that can help childrenlearn a conceptual hierarchy. However, these previous studiesused different datasets and methods which made difficult thesystematic comparison of these cues and the study of their rel-ative contribution. Here, we use a large-scale corpus of child-directed speech and a classification-based evaluation methodwhich allowed us to investigate, within the same framework,various cues that varied in their degree of explicitness. Wefound the most explicit cues to be too sparse or too noisy tosupport robust learning (though part of the noise may be dueto imperfect operationalization). In contrast, the implicit cuesoffered, overall, a reliable source of information. Our workconfirms the utility of caregiver talk for conveying conceptualinformation. It provides a stepping stone towards a cognitivemodel that would use this information in a principled way,leading to testable predictions about children’s conceptual de-velopment.