Multiple Proposal Memory in Observational Word Learning

The temporal co-occurrence of a novel word and a visual referent undoubtedly facilitates establishing the meaning of a word. It is less understood, however, how precisely learners can keep track of the frequencies of these co-occurrences across situations. Observational learning may rely on one or few highly informative exposures (propose-but-verify) or it may be driven by the collection of evidence in a more gradual and parallel manner (multiple-hypotheses tracking). We evaluated both hypotheses within two experiments and found that learners were able to keep track of more than one hypothesis for a novel word. However, this memory was strongly dependent on each learner’s individual learning path (i.e., which meanings they had considered before) and influenced by the order of presentation of potential referents. We argue for an account of a multiple-proposal memory rather than a multiple co-occurrence memory.