Hi Norbert, I read your blog and there is much to say. Re the
header above (i.e. False Truisms NH), I only fear that you, like the rest of the world, might be taking
these findings as an excuse to write off the domain-specific
structure-dependent scheme for the lexicon that I have devoted myself to, last
several decades! As we say in this new paper, but without room for
discussion at all, is that only a minute, tiny, microscopically small set of
the words are acquired "by" observation (and even this leaves aside
that no one has a clue about how seeing a dog could teach you the
"meaning" of dog, though it could spotlight, pun, the intended
referent in best cases). We did not sample the words.
We deliberately chose from the teeniest set of whole-object basic-level nouns
those very few that our subjects could guess with any accuracy at all (roughly,
1/2 the time, with all other words guessed correctly a laughable maximum of 7%
of the time), and only from specially chosen "good"
exemplars. All the same, "syntactic bootstrapping" skirts
with circularity unless there is another -- non-syntactic -- procedure to learn
a few "seed" words, those that, once and painfully acquired, can help
you build a representation of the input (something like a rudimentary clause,
or at least, to decide on the structural position of the Subject NP); it is
that improved input that next makes a snap of learning all the
words. So if we now say (and we do) that there is a procedure for
asyntactic, domain-general, learning of first words, this alone can't do for
all the rest (try learning probably, think etc from watching scenarios
in which these words are uttered -- or try even learning jump, tail, animal
from the evidence of the senses, as Plato rightly noted). So please
though I'm pleased at your response to this new work, don't forget that its
role is minute over the lexical stock, though crucial as the starting point.
Second, it turns out (I believe) that one trial learning is the rule rather
than an exception that god makes for word learning in particular. Despite
my fondness for the small-set-of-options story we told in that first paper
(don't you love it! something right about it) it turns out that subjects behave
the same way if you put them in the icon-to-sound experimental condition
studied by our opponents. And I have attached the paper showing
this! The paper you read examines the natural case (using video of
real contexts) and this paper examines the fake case, but in so doing achieves
a level of experimental control we couldn't attain originally. Again it
is one-trial learning with no savings of the choices not made. I think
you'll like this, because it really exposes the logic. And most
important, it turns out (we at least mention this past-and-present literature
on one-trial learning, particularly Gallistel, who speaks for the ants and the
wasps) that learning in general (until, as I say, it becomes structured) across
tasks and species has this character. There has always been a small
subset of the psychologists (Rock, Guthrie, Gallistel...) who denied, on their
data + logic that associationist, gradualist, learning was the key, but they
have always been overwhelmed in number and influence by the
associationists. As you point out, even you (even Chomsky, if you want to
go back to his early writings) think/thought about phoneme/morpheme learning
this way. A marvelous new paper from Roediger traverses this
literature and ably makes the case that learning in the general case is more
determinative and less statistical than you thought.
We have some new work, I think important, showing the temporal and
situational conditions that actually support the primitive first procedure for
word learning.
