Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Children learn word meanings from their patterns of usage in their everyday input. This trivial statement is made more interesting by the fact that most patterns of word usage, even around language-learning children, are not particularly good at revealing word meaning. So, do children simply ignore much of their input and learn words primarily from the few instances of usage where word meaning is transparent? Or are there pieces of information in the sea of opaque word usage that would allow children to learn words slowly over time? In an adaptation of Gleitman and colleagues’ classic Human Simulation Paradigm (Gillette et al., 1999), the current study explores the kinds of input that contribute to learning. Our data suggest that the answer may depend on how “learning” is assessed.