Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A key aspect of understanding how children learn the meanings of words involves understanding how they mine different sources of information (e.g., observational, linguistic) in the service of learning. According to one dominant view, there exists a class of words (i.e., “hard words”; Gleitman et al., 2005) for which learning their meaning requires access to information beyond the observational contexts in which those words occur. Building upon previous work on this topic that employed the Human Simulation Paradigm, a paradigm commonly used for investigating vocabulary learning, the current study revisits the role of observational contexts for the acquisition of one class of hard words: nouns that denote non-basic level object categories (or “hard nouns”; see Kako, 2005). These data reveal that although observational contexts may not be sufficient to yield learning of precise hard noun meanings, they allow learners to extract systematic partial knowledge, knowledge that may lay a critical foundation for meaning acquisition.