Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Past mechanistic accounts of children’s word learningclaim that a simple type of cross-situational learning ispowerful enough to match observed rates of learning,even in quite ambiguous situations. However, a limita-tion in some of these analyses is their reliance on an un-realistic assumption that the learner only hears a word insituations containing the intended referent. This studyanalyzed a more general type of cross-situational learn-ing based on the relative frequency of word-object pairs,and found it to be slower than the simple mechanismanalyzed in prior work. We then analytically exploredwhether relative-frequency learning can be improved byincorporating the mutual exclusivity (ME) principle–an assumption that words map to objects 1-to-1. Ouranalyses show that with a certain type of correlation inword-to-word relationship, ME makes relative frequencylearning as efficient as fast-mapping, which can learn aword in one exposure.