tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post6380790423263555572..comments2024-03-28T03:28:44.205-07:00Comments on Faculty of Language: Learning Fast and Slow I: How Children Learn WordsNorberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15701059232144474269noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-18555136290675389262019-07-22T02:56:11.503-07:002019-07-22T02:56:11.503-07:00Actually that was an very interesting post, though...Actually that was an very interesting post, though children can learn easily we have some different kind a activities to teach children about speaking and writing.<br /><a href="%E2%80%9Dwww.sugsar.com/brain-training.html" rel="nofollow"> Kids Brain Trainer </a><br />christyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11901409443503238736noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-28541434203353513882013-03-21T21:39:35.579-07:002013-03-21T21:39:35.579-07:00Yes, but was it collected under the conditions und...Yes, but was it collected under the conditions under which this one or its variants would appear, perhaps more people wiring their houses like Deb Roy will answer such questions. I looked through the English language portions of the Childes database for such things, as has Andrea Zukowski, without finding very much, but the investigators aren't usually there when the kids are being put to bed, nor in many other kinds of routine situations.AveryAndrewshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17701162517596420514noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-20683721610696421212013-03-21T18:17:22.811-07:002013-03-21T18:17:22.811-07:00Avery: I did a quick search in about half a millio...Avery: I did a quick search in about half a million sentences of child directed English--about half a year's learning data--but did not find any instance of the informative question you have in mind. Charles Yanghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06041398285400095406noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-67450012340350277442013-03-21T16:05:33.956-07:002013-03-21T16:05:33.956-07:00I wonder if there might not be some version of the...I wonder if there might not be some version of the basic idea here that worked for syntax, for example utterances such as 'who do you want to read you a story' might provide could occasions for learning the basic constraint to to-contraction, whatever it is, because the context makes them intelligible and the subject matter interesting (and they might get said several times a week at least).AveryAndrewshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17701162517596420514noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-75806892483738363732013-03-20T12:10:31.584-07:002013-03-20T12:10:31.584-07:00From Lila:
Replying both to Charles and to Alex C...From Lila:<br /><br />Replying both to Charles and to Alex Clark: Yes, John Trueswell and I do pro tem endorse the model that we worked on with Stevens and Yang (see our joint CS proceedings paper, Stevens/Yang/Trueswell/Gleitman, in review). This is even though, as Alex Clark quickly notices, the model as it stands has a little associationist machine inside it. The interest of this view, in our opinion, is that the mini-preservation of past experience has some potential utility for understanding how the learner could acquire homonyms (notice that John’s and my model, Propose but Verify) has trouble just in this regard. But as long as we’re talking here, I want to point out that, in the end, I have the same reservations about this aspect of the Pursuit model as does Alex, namely that it is underlyingly an associationist scheme in disguise, however limited. <br /><br />As Charles points out in his reply to Alex, the necessity is to deal with the real and exploding ambiguity that every observation presents (see our pictures of “laboratory” and “real” input circumstances, reproduced in the two panels in Charles’ blog), and the Pursuit model does it via some species of limited/controlled cumulative learning, along with some background constraints on representation (e.g., the “whole object bias” and “mutual exclusivity” both a la Ellen Markman). But such constraints, while required, don’t by themselves come near to narrowing the hypothesis space sufficiently to enable word learning. Instead or in addition, there ways of avoiding error (false conjectures) that do not involve preservation of past experience at all, and indeed our recent findings (stay tuned for the papers documenting these, which are now in preparation) demonstrate that by and large people use this alternative machinery; namely, they use a species of pre-filtering such that “low quality information” (see our original paper, the empirical data source for the Pursuit model) is simply ignored, and never even enters into the search for meaning. The finding is that, with considerable reliability, subjects can distinguish between exposures to a word in context that present good opportunities for word learning, and those that do not; and so they attempt their word learning only on the former subparts of the actual input data. One of these bases by which subjects really do select a meaning, given an observation, is via their exquisite sensitivity to the timing properties of this “high quality input” vis a vis the utterance of a new word. So the short story here is that our findings have led us to a position in which the learner pre-selects usable input (and so avoids error) rather than optimizing over a set of inputs (and so recovering from error). And thank heaven, because the learners would otherwise fail because they have tiny and unreliable remembrance of things past.Norberthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15701059232144474269noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-27469305917772237462013-03-12T04:34:50.460-07:002013-03-12T04:34:50.460-07:00Hi Alex: The hypothesis space makes all the differ...Hi Alex: The hypothesis space makes all the difference. Even in the simple case like this, where all the learner does is to figure out the associations, an enormous amount of hypothesis space structuring goes into it, e.g., stuff like the whole object constraint, mutual exclusivity (a probabilistic version; see the paper). Other constraints are essentially built in how we annotated the video data, including word segmentation.Charles Yanghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06041398285400095406noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-43208414005116400012013-03-12T03:47:17.404-07:002013-03-12T03:47:17.404-07:00Very interesting post, Charles. Can I ask one thin...Very interesting post, Charles. Can I ask one thing -- you say "associationist learning is hopeless.", but it seems like your model is quite associationist -- indeed variational learning is as you point out quite old school. So what is the difference between the 'bad' associationism, and 'good' associationism? Is it the nature of the hypothesis space -- highly structured versus unstructured?Alex Clarkhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04634767958690153584noreply@blogger.com