Dr. Hartshorne’s Video Series: Cross-Situational Learning
How do we learn language? This phenomenon that allows us to communicate thoughts and ideas across time and space seems to be fairly simple: I think something, I speak (or write or sign) it, and you understand and interpret it. Straightforward as it amy seem, language and language acquisition is anything but. From picking up the earliest beginnings of language to understanding the complexities of synaptic and syntactic bootstrapping, language is an intricate, sophisticated experience (for a video on semantic bootstrapping click here). Despite this, small children are able to learn and practice language every day. How do they learn about words and the rules that govern them?
Here in the Language Learning Lab it is our mission to delve into the complex processes that go into acquiring a language. Watch this short video from our Principle Investigator (PI) Dr. Joshua Hartshorne for a brief introduction into the process of cross-situational learning!
So what is cross-situational learning?
Simply put, cross-situational learning is the process of figuring out the meaning of an ambiguous or unfamiliar word that is used multiple times by using clues from the situation in which the word is being used. The key is to find commonalities between all the different times that the word is used in order to figure out the meaning. If we can do this, we can perform a sort of process of elimination to discover what the word means. For example, in the video Dr. Hartshorne talks about the object called a “tomah”. We are presented with two images that both consist of four objects. We can figure out which object is the “tomah” by seeing that in both images, there is one object in common.
This is starting to get a little complicated — can you imagine what it’s like for kids? So the question is — do we think that children are able to keep track of all this information in order to learn about novel objects and discover the meaning of words with which they are unfamiliar? As Dr. Hartshorne says in the video, it might actually be necessary. It’s pretty rare for children to be told explicitly what a word means, so if they can use cross-situational learning, they would be better able to learn about the world around them.
In cross-situational learning experiments, children are shown a series of images with some objects and words that are said in the background. The children then use
Okay, but what about the real world?
Unfortunately, cross-situational learning experiments are not wholly representative of how kids acquire language in the ~real world~. In reality, kids are not just floating along with a small set of other objects that they can pretty easily identify and between which they can distinguish. The types of environments that children are exposed to are more like this image — there are lots of ambiguous stimuli that the child has to figure out.
In another video by Dr. Hartshorne, he discusses the “gavagai” problem. This concept is summarized in Chen Yu and Linda B. Smith’s research article in Psychological Science called Rapid Word Learning Under Uncertainty via Cross-Situational Statistics:
“Quine (1960) famously presented the core problem for learning word meanings from their co-occurrence with perceived events in the world. He imagined an anthropologist who observes a speaker saying ‘‘gavagai’’ while pointing in the general direction of a field. The intended referent (rabbit, grass, the field, or rabbit ears, etc.) is indeterminate from this experience.”
This predicament is an example of how cross-situational learning must be used in the real world to determine the meaning for words and how much more confusing and ambiguous it can be compared to the tidy experimental setups that are usually used when testing for cross-situational learning.
So what?
So why should we study cross-situational learning — why should we care? Simply put, cross-situational learning is one of the methods that children use to figure out what is going on in the world around them. We can learn a lot by looking at these early learning processes exhibited in kids which will add to our knowledge about language and language acquisition on the whole. In issue of cross-situational learning is not a question of whether or not kids use it, but instead what ROLE it plays in language acquisition. Researchers are still trying to find an answer to that question, so stay tuned for more exciting research in this area!
In the meantime, check out Dr. Hartshorne’s YouTube channel for more fun and informative videos on all things language learning!
