Abstract
Humans come to recognize an infinite variety of natural and man-made objects in their lifetime and make use of sounds to identify and categorize them. How does this lifelong learning process begin? Many hypotheses have been proposed to explain the learning of first words with some emerging from the particular characteristics observed in child development. One is the peculiar trend in the speed with which words are learned, which have been referred to in the literature as “fast mapping”. We present a neural network model trained in stages that parallel developmental ones and that simulates cortical processes of self-organization during an early crucial stage of first word learning. This is done by taking into account strictly visual and acoustic perceptions only. The results obtained show evidence of the emergence in the artificial maps used in the model, of cortical functions similar to those found in the biological correlates in the brain. Evidence of non-catastrophic fast mapping based on the quantity of objects and labels gradually learned by the model is also found. We interpret these results as meaning that early stages of first word learning may be explained by strictly perceptual learning processes, coupled with cortical processes of self-organization and of fast mapping. Specialized word-learning mechanisms thus need not be invoked, at least not at an early word-learning stage.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bednar JA. Learning to see: genetic and environmental influences on visual development. Ph.D. thesis, University of Texas at Austin, tech Report AI-TR-02-294 2002.
Belin P, Zatorre RJ, Ahad P. Human temporal-lobe response to vocal sounds. Cogn Brain Res. 2002;13:17–26.
Biederman I. Recognition-by-components: a theory of human image understanding. Psychol Rev. 1987;94:115–47.
Black AW, Taylor PA. The festival speech synthesis system: System documentation. Tech Rep HCRC/TR-83, Human Communcation Research Centre, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh 1997.
Booth AE, Waxman SR. Word learning is smart: evidence that conceptual information affects preschoolers’ extension of novel words. Cognition. 2002;84:B11–B22.
Brewer AA, Liu J, Wade AR, Wandell BA. Visual field maps and stimulus selectivity in human ventral occipital cortex. Nat Neurosci. 2005;8:1102–9.
Carey S. The child as word learner. In: Halle M, Bresnan J, Miller G, editors. Linguistic theory and psychological reality. Cambridge: MIT Press;1978. pp. 264–93.
Carey S, Spelke E. Science and core knowledge. J Philos Sci. 1996;63:515–33.
Dannemiller JL. A test of color constancy in 9-and 20-weeks-old human infants following simulated illuminant changes. Dev Psychol. 1989;25:171–84.
Dickinson DK. First impressions: children’s knowledge of words gained from a single exposure. Appl Psycholinguist. 1984;5:359–73.
Diesendruck G, Bloom P. How specific is the shape bias?. Child Dev. 2003;74:168–78.
Eimas PD, Quinn PC. Studies on the formation of perceptually based basic-level categories in young infants. Child Dev. 1994;3:903–17.
Escabi MA, Read HL. Representation of spectrotemporal sound information in the ascending auditory pathway. Biol Cybern. 2003;89:350–62.
Ganger J, Brent MR. Reexamining the vocabulary spurt. Dev Psychol. 2004;40:621–32.
Gershkoff-Stowe L, Smith LB. Shape and the first hundred nouns. Child Dev. 2004;75:1098–114.
Gopnik A, Nazzi T. Words, kinds, and causal powers: a theory theory perspective on early naming and categorization. In: Rakison DH, editors. Early category and concept development. Oxford: Oxford University Press;2003. pp. 303–29.
Grill-Spector K, Kourtzi Z, Kanwisher N. The lateral occipital complex and its role in object recognition. Vision Res. 2001;41:1409–422.
Hebb DO. The organization of behavior. New York: Wiley;1949.
Kanwisher N. The ventral visual object pathway in humans: evidence from fMRI. In: Chalupa L, Werner J, editors. The visual neurosciences. Cambridge: MIT Press;2003.
Kemler Nelson DG, Frankenfield A, Morris C, Blair E. Young children’s use of functional information to categorize artifacts: three factors that matter. Cognition. 2000;77:133–68.
Kohonen T. Self-organizing formation of topologically correct feature maps. Biol Cybern. 1982;43:59–69.
Kohonen T. Self-organizing maps. Berlin: Springer;1995.
Kripke SA. Naming and necessity. In: Davidson D, Harman GH, editors. Semantics of natural language. Dordrecht: Reidel Publishing Company;1972. pp. 253–355.
Landau B, Smith LB, Jones S. The importance of shape in early lexical learning. Cogn Dev. 1988;3:299–321.
Malach R, Reppas JB, Benson RR, Kwong KK, Jiang H, Kennedy WA, Ledden PJ, Brady TJ, Rosen BR, Tootell RB. Object-related activity revealed by functional magnetic resonance imaging in human occipital cortex. Procee Nat Acad Sci USA. 1995;92:8135–139.
Mandler JM. The foundations of mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press;2004.
Markson L, Bloom P. Evidence against a dedicated system for word learning in children. Nature. 1997;385:813–15.
Mazzone M, De la Cruz V, Plebe A. Una simulazione biologicamente orientata dell’apprendimento di aggettivi: tra categorizzazione e concettualizzazione. Sist Intelligenti. 2008;20:293–305.
Michotte A. La Perception de la causalité. Editions de l’Institut supérieur de Philosophie, Louvain, english translation by TR Miles, E Miles, Methuen, London 1963;1946.
Murphy GL, Medin DL. The role of theories in conceptual coherence. Psychol Rev. 1985;92:289–316.
Nayar S, Murase H. Visual learning and recognition of 3-d object by appearance. Int J Comput Vis. 1995;14:5–24.
Nazzi T, Bertoncini J. Before and after the vocabulary spurt: two modes of word acquisition?. Dev Sci. 2003;6:136–42.
Plebe A. Learning visual invariance. In: Verleysen M, editors. ESANN 2006—14th European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks. Evere: d-side Publications;2003. pp. 71–6.
Plebe A. A model of angle selectivity development in visual area V2. Neurocomputing. 2007;70:2060–6.
Plebe A. The ventral visual path: moving beyond V1 with computational models. In: Portocello TA, Velloti RB (eds) Visual cortex: new research. New York: Nova Science;2008. pp. 97–160.
Plebe A, Domenella RG. Early development of visual recognition. BioSystems. 2006;86:63–74.
Plebe A, Domenella RG. Object recognition by artificial cortical maps. Neural Netw. 2007;20:763–80.
Plebe A, De la Cruz V, Mazzone M. Synthetic learners of objects and names. In: Demiris Y, Scassellati B, Mareschal D, editors. Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Development and Learning, IEEE;2007. pp. 300–5.
Plebe A, De la Cruz V, Mazzone M. Modeling language emergence by way of working memory. In: Smith ADM, Smith K, Ferrer i Cancho R, editors. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference (EVOLANG7). Singapore: World Scientific Press;1976. pp. 480–1.
Pruden SM, Hirsh-Pasek K, Golinkoff RM, Hennon EA. The birth of words: ten-month-olds learn words through perceptual salience. Child Dev. 2006;77:266–80.
Putnam H. The meaning of “meaning”. In: Putnam H, editors. Mind, language and reality, vol 2. Cambridge: MIT Press;1975.
Regier T. The emergence of words: attentional learning in form and meaning. Cogn Sci. 2005;29:819–65.
Rogers TT, McClelland JL. Semantic Cognition—a parallel distributed processing approach. Cambridge;MIT Press;2006.
Scholl BJ, Tremoulet PD. Perceptual causality and animacy. Trends Cogn Sci. 2000;4:299–309.
Searle JR. Intentionality: an essay in the philosophy of mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press;1983.
Sengpiel F, Kind PC. The role of activity in development of the visual system. Current Biol. 2002;12:818–26.
Sirosh J, Miikkulainen R. Topographic receptive fields and patterned lateral interaction in a self-organizing model of the primary visual cortex. Neural Comput. 1997;9:577–94.
Smith LB. How domain-general processes may create domain-specific biases. In: Bowerman M, Levinson S, editors. Language acquisition and conceptual development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press;2001.
Smith LB. Shape: A developmental product. In: Carlson L, VanderZee E, editors. Functional features in language and space. Oxford: Oxford University Press;2005.
Tomasello M. The cultural origins of human cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press;1999.
Tomasello M. Constructing a language: a usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press;2003.
Turrigiano GG, Nelson SB. Homeostatic plasticity in the developing nervous system. Nat Rev Neurosci. 2004;391:892–6.
Vanduffel W, Tootell RB, Schoups AA, Orban GA. The organization of orientation selectivity throughout the macaque visual cortex. Cereb Cortex. 2002;12:647–62.
Verkindt C, Bertrand O, Echallier F, Pernier J. Tonotopic organization of the human auditory cortex: N100 topography and multiple dipole model analysis. Electroencephalogr Clin Neurophysiol. 1995;96:143–56.
von der Malsburg C. Self-organization of orientation sensitive cells in the striate cortex. Kibernetic. 1973;14:85–100.
Wallis G, Rolls E. Invariant face and object recognition in the visual system. Prog Neurobiol. 1997;51:167–94.
Willshaw DJ, von der Malsburg C. How patterned neural connections can be set up by self-organization. Procee Royal Soci London. 1976;B194:431–45.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Plebe, A., Mazzone, M. & De la Cruz, V. First Words Learning: A Cortical Model. Cogn Comput 2, 217–229 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12559-010-9044-5
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12559-010-9044-5