Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We test the predictions of different computational models ofcross-situational word learning that have been proposed in theliterature by comparing their behavior to that of young childrenand adults in the word learning task conducted by Ramscar,Dye, and Klein (2013). Our experimental results show that aHebbian learner and a model that relies on hypothesis testingfail to account for the behavioral data obtained from both pop-ulations. Ruling out such accounts might help reducing thesearch space and better focus on the most relevant aspects ofthe problem, in order to disentangle the mechanisms used dur-ing language acquisition to map words and referents in a highlynoisy environment.