Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The emergence of language around a child’s first birthday isone of the greatest transformations in human development.Does this transition require a fundamental shift in the child’sknowledge or beliefs, or could it instead be attributable to moregradual changes in processing abilities? We present a simplemodel of cognitive performance that supports the second con-clusion. The premise of this model is that any cognitive op-eration requires multiple steps, each of which require sometime to complete and have some probability of failure. Weuse meta-analysis to estimate these parameters for two com-ponents of simple ostensive word learning: social cue use andword recognition. When combined in our model, these esti-mates suggest that learning should be very difficult for chil-dren younger than around a year, especially with gaze alone.This model takes a first step towards quantifying performancelimitations for cognitive development and may be broadly ap-plicable to other developmental changes.