2009/11/16 by Prahlad Gupta, Jamie Tisdale
Computer Science · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Language Development and Disorders #Language and cultural evolution #Speech and dialogue systems
paper · doi:10.1098/rstb.2009.0132
openalex publication_date 2009/11/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Word learning is studied in a multitude of ways, and it is often not clear what the relationship is between different phenomena. In this article, we begin by outlining a very simple functional framework that despite its simplicity can serve as a useful organizing scheme for thinking about various types of studies of word learning. We then review a number of themes that in recent years have emerged as important topics in the study of word learning, and relate them to the functional framework, noting nevertheless that these topics have tended to be somewhat separate areas of study. In the third part of the article, we describe a recent computational model and discuss how it offers a framework that can integrate and relate these various topics in word learning to each other. We conclude that issues that have typically been studied as separate topics can perhaps more fruitfully be thought of as closely integrated, with the present framework offering several suggestions about the nature of such integration.