Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Cognitive Science, whose genesis was interdisciplinary, shows signs of reverting to a disjoint collection of fields. This paper presents a compact, theory-free task that inherently requires an integrated solution. The basic problem is learning a subset of an arbitrary natural language from picture-sentence pairs. W e describe a very specific instance of this task and show how it presents fundamental (but not impossible) challenges to several areas of cognitive science including vision, language, inference and learning.