Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper describes a lexical acquisition mechanism that was implemented in order to increase the robustness of a Natural Language Processing system. Although the mechanism was not intended to be a cognitive model of children's language acquisition, it demonstrates many similarities with psycholinguistic findings. In particular, the structure of the domain knowledge representation forces the system to take a bipolar approach to learning nouns and verbs. Psycholinguistic studies demonstrate differing treatment of nouns and verbs by children and suggest a structural basis for this difference. The knowledge-level similarities between our system and human linguistic knowledge make it possible to infer that children must adopt a similar strategy to effectively learn word meanings.