Feature Discovery in Object Individuation

Many developmental studies have pointed out the relationship between children’s ability of object cognition and word learning. In this study, the relationship between object segregation and feature bias to objects in word generalization was investigated with a connectionist model. In particular, the model focused on building feature and object representation from simple visual images. Some previously proposed connectionist models could account for children’s systematic feature bias in word generalization based on the frequency of word learning. However, the previous model can not clearly account for a special case that late talkers, who have smaller vocabulary than average, do not show typical bias. We suggested that the proposed model could account some key issues in object segregation and word generalization including the late talkers’ pattern.