Social Inference and Early Lexical Learning
Infants represent differences between groups of talkers, and use this information to guide their social preferences. Nevertheless, models of word learning often abstract away from social information. The omission of social information from these models makes them unable to capture the way that children select which linguistic data to learn from based on their social and cultural experiences. In this talk I review two previous infant word learning experiments and show that their results can be better predicted by a model which incorporates infants’ beliefs about the relative value of informants.