Abstract
An influential proposal by the developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello is that infants only properly begin learning word meanings when they acquire the concept of a communicative action, which happens around the age of 12 months. While Tomasello advances interesting empirical evidence for this proposal, he does not make any suggestions about how communicative actions are represented in the infant brain, or about the mechanism through which an understanding of communicative actions facilitates word learning. In this chapter, I will present a neural network model of language and cognitive development which addresses both of these questions. The representations of communicative actions that the model learns (which have roughly the form X says that P) encode the propositional content of utterances in a novel way. I also discuss how these representations may serve as developmental precursors for more sophisticated propositional attitude representations such as X believes that P.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
Our simulation considers only content words: We do not consider the issue of how the meanings of function words are learned or how the infant learns the syntactic principles that map surface sequences of words with episode representations. But these issues are the focus of a separate neural network model (see Takac et al. 2012).
References
Averbeck, B., Chafee, M., Crowe, D., & Georgopoulos, A. (2002). Parallel processing of serial movements in prefrontal cortex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 99(20), 13172–13177.
Baddeley, A., Gathercole, S., & Papagno, C. (1998). The phonological loop as a language learning device. Psychological Review, 105(1), 158–173.
Baldwin, D., Markman, E., Bill, B., Desjardins, R., Irwin, J., & Tidball, G. (1996). Infants’ reliance on a social criterion for establishing word-object relations. Child Development, 67, 3135–3153.
Ballard, D., Hayhoe, M., Pook, P., & Rao, R. (1997). Deictic codes for the embodiment of cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 20(4), 723–767.
Brentano, F. (1874). Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot.
Buckner, R., & Wheeler, M. (2001). The cognitive neuroscience of remembering. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2, 624–634.
Buckner, R., Andrews-Hanna, J., & Schacter, D. (2008). The brain’s default network: Anatomy, function and relevance to disease. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1124, 1–38.
Butterworth, G., & Jarrett, N. (1991). What minds have in common is space: Spatial mechanisms for perspective taking in infancy. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 9, 55–72.
Caza, G., & Knott, A. (2012). Pragmatic bootstrapping: A neural network model of vocabulary acquisition. Language Learning and Development, 8, 1–23.
Chang, F. (2002). Symbolically speaking: A connectionist model of sentence production. Cognitive Science, 26, 609–651.
Dennett, D. (Ed.). (1989). The intentional stance. Cambridge: MIT Press/Bradford Books.
Diesendruck, G., Markson, L., Akhtar, N., & Reudor, A. (2004). Two-year-olds sensitivity to speakers’ intent: An alternative account of Samuelson and Smith. Developmental Science, 7(1), 33–41.
Gärdenfors, P. (2004). Conceptual spaces. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Jacquette, D. (Ed.). (2004). Brentano’s concept of intentionality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Knott, A. (2012). Sensorimotor cognition and natural language syntax. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Miller, E., & Cohen, J. (2001). An integrative theory of prefrontal cortex function. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 24, 167–202.
Montague, R. (1974). The proper treatment of quantification in ordinary English. In R. Thomason (Ed.), Formal philosophy: Selected papers of Richard Montague (pp. 247–270). New Haven: Yale University Press.
Plate, T. (2003). Holographic reduced representations. CSLI Lecture Notes Number 150. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Saffran, J., Aslin, R., & Newport, E. (1996). Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science, 274, 1926–1928.
Siskind, J. (1996). A computational study of cross-situational techniques for learning word-to-meaning mappings. Cognition, 61(1-2), 39–91.
Sutton, R., & Barto, A. (1998). Reinforcement learning: An introduction. Cambridge. Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Takac, M., & Knott, A. (2013). A neural network model of working memory for episodes. In M. Knauff (Ed.), Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1432–1437). Berlin: Curran Associates, Inc.
Takac, M., Benuskova, L., & Knott, A. (2012). Mapping sensorimotor sequences to word sequences: A connectionist model of language acquisition and sentence generation. Cognition, 125, 288–308.
Tomasello, M. (1995). Joint attention as social cognition. In C. Moore & P. Dunham (Eds.), Joint attention: Its origins and role in development (pp. 103–130). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Tomasello, M. (2000). The social-pragmatic theory of word learning. Pragmatics, 10(4), 401–413.
Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press.
Tomasello, M., & Herrmann, E. (2010). Ape and human cognition: What’s the difference? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19(1), 3–8.
van der Velde, F., & de Kamps, M. (2006). Neural blackboard architectures of combinatorial structures in cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 29, 37–108.
Yu, C., & Ballard, D. H. (2007). A unified model of early word learning: Integrating statistical and social cues. Neurocomputing, 70(13-15), 2149–2165.
Zhang, Y., Meyers, E., Bichot, N., Serre, T., Poggio, T., & Desimone, R. (2011). Object decoding with attention in inferior temporal cortex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 108(21), 8850–8855.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Singapore
About this paper
Cite this paper
Knott, A. (2014). How Infants Learn Word Meanings and Propositional Attitudes: A Neural Network Model. In: Hung, TW. (eds) Communicative Action. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4585-84-2_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4585-84-2_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-4585-83-5
Online ISBN: 978-981-4585-84-2
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)