A model of word meaning inference development in child

Abstract

Many researchers of infant language acquisition have reported that three-year-old infants can properly expand the meaning of a noun to a new object. However, for the verb, Imai et al. reported that infants gradually acquire a proper expansion of verb meaning from 3 years to 5 years old. In this study, we analyze the experimental data with a statistical model in order to elucidate the structure of information processing in a child's meaning inference of nouns and verbs.