Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

What does it take to learn a new word? Many of the words welearn, we have learned from language itself – by encounteringthem in various informative contexts. Here, we investigate thelimits of learning from context by studying how people learnnew words from very sparse contexts, at the extreme, a contextin which all content words are replaced by nonsense words. Wefind that participants exposed to even such extremely sparsecontexts nevertheless learn something about the meaning ofwords embedded in those contexts. Performance tended to bebetter when knowledge was assessed by first directing people’sattention to the part of speech of the target words.