Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

An increasing body of research has demonstrated that human learners are able to use co-occurrences among wordsand objects to form word-object associations (e.g., Yu & Smith, 2007). In this study, we further investigated learners’ ability touse statistical information to learn labels at different hierarchical levels. Participants were presented with objects and words inambiguous learning trials. In some learning trials, participants saw multiple objects and heard their individual labels presentedin a random order, while in other trials, category labels were presented instead. Results from three experiments providedconverging evidence that adults were able to use word-object co-occurrences across different situations to learn hierarchicallabels. Moreover, participants generalized category labels to novel members at the same level but not to superordinate-levelinstances. There was also an interaction between the level of ambiguity in learning contexts and performance in label learningand generalization.