Recent laboratory experiments have shown that both infant and adult learners can acquire word-referent mappings using cross-situational statistics. The vast majority of the work on this topic has used unfamiliar objects presented on neutral backgrounds as the visual contexts for word learning. However, these laboratory contexts are much different…

Although statistical learning (SL) has been studied extensively in developmental dyslexia (DD), less attention has been paid to other fundamental challenges in language acquisition, such as cross-situational word learning. Such investigation is important for determining whether and how SL processes are affected in DD at the word level. In this…

Prior research has shown that people can learn many nouns (i.e., word--object mappings) from a short series of ambiguous situations containing multiple words and objects. For successful cross-situational learning, people must approximately track which words and referents co-occur most frequently. This study investigates the effects of allowing…

We examine the influence of inferring interlocutors' referential intentions from their body movements at the early stage of lexical acquisition. By testing human participants and comparing their performances in different learning conditions, we find that those embodied intentions facilitate both word discovery and word-meaning association. In…