Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How does the acquisition of a new word affect the successive acquired ones? We model language acquisition interms of foraging in an unprecedentedly fine-grained 1-child corpus (0-3y, RoyEtAl2015). We assess whether successive wordsare learned in close semantic clusters or not (exploitation vs. exploration) and the structure of these clusters. Words are definedin terms of topic distribution in the parental input (Latent Dirichlet Allocation). Distance between successively learned wordsis measured as cosine distance between their topic distribution.Word acquisition can be accurately described as foraging in a sparse resource environment with very local path dependence(power law distribution: alpha=3.9±0.2; detrended fluctuation analysis: alpha=0.6). Words are acquired in semantically closeclusters of 2-4 successive words (Recurrence Quantification Analysis: L=2, LMAX=4, V=2, VMAX=4). The effects remainwhen controlling for shuffled baselines and temporal distance between word acquisition.