Word frequency effects have long served as an empirical and theoretical test bed for theories of language processing. A number of recent studies have suggested that Contextual Diversity (CD) is a better metric of retrieval processes than word …
When learning about the world, we develop mental representations or concepts for things we have never seen. At the same time, we also develop representations for things that are similar to what we have experienced. Traditionally, similarity-based and …
A widely observed phenomenon in children’s word-extensions and generalizations is the characteristic-to-defining shift, whereby young children initially generalize words based on typical properties and gradually transition into generalizing words …
People have the capability to process text three times faster than they would naturally read it, yet many current theories of sentence processing rely on natural reading times as a proxy for processing difficulty. How can people read material so …
Previous work on concept learning has focused on how concepts are acquired without addressing metacognitive aspects of this process. An important part of concept learning from a learner’s perspective is subjectively knowing when a new concept has …
Context plays a ubiquitous role in language processing. For the most part, work in language processing investigates the effects of context without investigating questions about what determines a context. For example, interpretation of any referential …
Current models of word learning focus on the mapping between words and their referents and remain mute with regard to conceptual representation. We develop a cross-situational model of word learning that captures word-concept mapping by jointly …