Propose But Verify
John C. Trueswell, Tamara Nicol Medina, Alon Hafri, Lila R. Gleitman · 2020
Abstract We report three eyetracking experiments that examine the learning procedure used by adults as they pair novel words and visually presented referents over a sequence of referentially ambiguous trials. Successful learning under such conditions has been argued to be the product of a learning procedure in which participants provisionally pair each novel word with several possible referents and use a statistical associative learning mechanism to gradually converge on a single mapping across learning instances. We argue here that successful learning in this setting is instead the product of a one-trial procedure in which a single hypothesized word-referent pairing is retained across learning instances, abandoned only if the subsequent instance fails to confirm the pairing. We provide experimental evidence for this propose-but-verify learning procedure via three experiments in which adult participants attempted to learn the meanings of nonce words cross-situationally under varying degrees of referential uncertainty.