Cross-Situational Word Learning in Context
Speaker: Judith Köhne
Abstract:
When acquiring new languages, people face (among others) two major problems: Firstly, words to be learned are often embedded in sentences and, secondly, referents onto which words have to be mapped are part of rich visual con-texts (referential uncertainty, Gleitman, 1990). To overcome these difficulties, learners must strategically exploit linguistic and situational (e.g. visual) constraints: Cross-situational word learning (CSWL) and linguistic-bootstrapping effects are two important possibilities.
We conducted two eye-tracking experiments to investigate which mechanisms would work when people try to understand and learn unknown nouns embedded in sentence contexts and to map them onto objects belonging to semi-natural visual contexts. Our results show, firstly, that CSWL is indeed still applied when words and referents are embedded in linguistic and visual contexts and, secondly, that verb restrictions elicit anticipatory eye-movements and bootstrap noun understanding and learning. These findings extend our understanding of CSWL mechanisms and demonstrate the importance of considering word learning and foreign language processing in context.
