Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In order to successfully learn the meaning of words such asbin or pin, language learners must not only perceive relevantdifferences in the speech signal but also learn mappings fromwords to referents. Prior work in native (Stager & Werker,1997) and second (Pajak, Creel, & Levy, 2016) language ac-quisition has found that the ability to perceptually discrimi-nate between words does not guarantee successful word learn-ing. Learners fail to utilize knowledge that they can otherwiseuse in speech perception. To explore possible mechanisms ac-counting for this phenomenon, we developed a probabilisticmodel that infers both a word’s phonetic form and its asso-ciated referent. By analyzing different versions of the modelfitted to experimental results from Pajak et al. (2016), we ar-gue that a mechanism for spoken word learning needs to incor-porate both perceptual uncertainty as well as additional, task-specific sources of uncertainty.