Previous research suggests that a verb’s meaning is learned partly through the aggregated profile of syntactic frames associated with it. For example, “turn” occurs with transitive and intransitive frames in causative alternation (“He turned the car”/“The car turned”), indicating it is a causal verb. Some evidence demonstrates that young children combine multiple frames to map verbs to appropriate events. However, previous work always presented these frames together, in a single dialogue. What remains unknown is how verb learning occurs when the frames are separated, uttered in different referential contexts, as is likely in children’s everyday life. In a series of cross-situational word-learning experiments, we show that both adults and three-year-olds generalize verb meanings across different syntactic frames in a cross-situational learning task. These results shed light on the cross-situational mechanisms of syntactic bootstrapping.

Evidence for Cross-situational Syntactic Bootstrapping: Three-year olds Generalize Verb Meaning across Different Syntactic Frames

Children and adults use linguistic context to learn new words. For instance, in “She wears the dax,” “dax” likely refers to clothing. We asked whether learners retain these constraints across ambiguous word-learning exposures. Adults (n=139) learned 12 words. On Exposure 1, novel nouns were presented as the object of either Restrictive (e.g., “wears”) or Non-restrictive (“finds”) verbs. Participants selected which of two compatible referents the noun referred to. On Exposure 2, participants heard each noun again and chose between a distractor referent and the unselected referent from Exposure 1—now the only referent compatible with the previous Restrictive verb. If adults retain selectional restrictions, then Restrictive verbs should increase selection of the compatible referent. However, we found no difference between Restrictive (M=.74, SD=.26) and Non-restrictive (M=.76, SD=.24) conditions, p=.24. This suggests adults use verbs’ selectional restrictions to identify referents in the moment but do not retain these restrictions across exposures.

New exposure, no constraints: Semantic restrictions on novel nouns do not constrain adults’ subsequent referent selections

By 24 months, children rapidly infer the meanings of words from sentence context: for instance, inferring from “She eats the dax” that “dax” refers to a food item. However, prior work has typically presented these informative sentence contexts in the presence of the target referent; it is less clear whether sentence context on one exposure will influence learners’ referential hypotheses on subsequent exposures. Here, we present results suggesting that even adults have some difficulty using a word’s prior sentence context to constrain its subsequent hypothesized referents, and 3-year-olds fail to make these cross-exposure inferences at all. Finally, we examine an alternative avenue for sentence context to guide word learning: adults successfully use informative sentence contexts to disambiguate between previously encountered referents. Ongoing work examines this question in children. These results suggest linguistic context is most useful for forming in-the-moment hypotheses but may, in some contexts, also facilitate learning across exposures.

Examining the role of sentence context in cross-situational word learning

A central challenge of cross-situational word learning is retaining word-referent mappings across exposures. We evaluate Memory-Bound Pursuit (MBP), a hypothesis-testing model of cross-situational word-learning which aims to account for learners’ memory constraints via a single parameter targeting the number of words that can be learned concurrently. Here, we show that by varying this parameter with age, MBP can capture both children’s and adults’ cross-situational word-learning success under varying levels of ambiguity. We also present new experimental findings supporting novel predictions made by MBP about the retention of word-referent mappings across intervening exposures. These findings suggest that MBP provides a strong baseline model of cross-situational word learning, capturing both developmental trends and experimental evidence of memory limitations for word learning.

Memory as a computational constraint in cross-situational word learning

Poster Session 1

poster

The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society will take place in Sydney, Australia as a modified hybrid conference. Presentations from the main-session room will be live-streamed every day for all events. This will include all invited talks and award sessions. Recordings of all CogSci 2023 sessions will be made available for on-demand viewing after the conference.<br>
The in-person component will be held at the International Convention Centre Sydney at Darling Harbour. The Conference will take place Wednesday July 26th – Saturday July 29th, 2023 (Wednesday, July 26th is the Workshops Day).

Join us!

<br>[**The Program at a Glance can be found here**](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/COgSci-PAAG-V2.pdf)
<br>[**The Detailed Program can be found here**](https://online.fliphtml5.com/ebtyf/mswz/)
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#### **CogSci 2023 Program Book**
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CogSci 2023

The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.


**For a full list of posters in this session, click the See All link on the right side of the page.**

Poster Session 2 -  C : Cognitive Science

### Looking for Cogsci 2023? Please [click here](https://underline.io/events/405/reception) to switch to 2023 edition.


**Dear Colleagues,**

Welcome to the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society! 

This year’s conference brings together the latest research from all Cognitive Science and also highlights this year’s theme **Comparative Cognition: Animal Minds.** 

The program features four plenary speakers: Friederike Range (University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna), Onur Güntürkün (Ruhr University Bochum), Julia Fischer (University of Göttingen), and Erich Jarvis (The Rockefeller University). The keynotes and invited symposia showcase the broad spectrum of ideas that encompass the conference theme of comparative cognition. 

Further, the program includes the Rumelhart Prize keynote presentation by Susan Goldin-Meadow (University of Chicago), and symposia to celebrate the winner of the Elman Prize: Wei Ji Ma (New York University), the Heineken Award winner Robert Zatorre (McGill University), and the Robert J. Glushko Dissertation Prizes session.

The program committee for CogSci 2021 received 1,025 submissions, including 710 full papers, 275 member abstracts, 8 publication-based talks, as well as 15 proposals for symposia, and 17 for workshops and tutorials. After a rigorous review process, the committee selected 152 papers for oral presentation and inclusion in the conference proceedings (14.8%), 332 papers for poster presentation and inclusion in the proceedings (32.4%), and 175 papers for poster presentation with inclusion of abstracts in the proceedings (17.1%) We also selected 275 submitted member abstracts. In addition, we accepted 6 publication-based talks, 12 symposia, and 9 workshops and tutorials to make for an exciting and inclusive program.

We hope that you enjoy the conference this year!<br><br>

**Your Program Chairs,**
![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/99984908caba5e6453e5fc5ba34f3507.jpg)

**Learn more about the Vienna Cognitive Science Hub at the University of Vienna, hosts of CogSci 2021**

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To review the proceedings for the conference or review the searchable program, please visit the [website](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/program/).


CogSci 2021

The Cognitive Science Society brings together researchers from around the world who hold a common goal: understanding the nature of the human mind. The mission of the Society is to promote Cognitive Science as a discipline, and to foster scientific interchange among researchers in various areas of study, including Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Anthropology, Psychology, Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Education. The Society is a non-profit professional organization and its activities include sponsoring an annual conference and publishing the journals Cognitive Science and TopiCS.

This session has no scheduled virtual poster presentation time, but attendees will be able to comment and ask questions about your work/research asynchronously throughout the conference.<br>

**If you are a virtual poster presenter**, you can leave a message in your poster area chat space to advise times (and time zone) that you will be available either in the chat box, or by setting up your own online meeting room (Zoom, etc.).<br>
**If you are an attendee**, please check each poster's chat box and arrange time with presenter.<br>



Alexander LaTourrette

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SHORT BIO

Presentations

Evidence for Cross-situational Syntactic Bootstrapping: Three-year olds Generalize Verb Meaning across Different Syntactic Frames

New exposure, no constraints: Semantic restrictions on novel nouns do not constrain adults’ subsequent referent selections

Examining the role of sentence context in cross-situational word learning

Memory as a computational constraint in cross-situational word learning

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