Children's memories for the link between a newly trained word and its referent have been the focus of extensive past research. However, memory for the word form itself is rarely assessed among preschool-age children. When it is, children are typically asked to verbally recall the forms, and they generally perform at floor on such tests. To better measure children's memory for word forms, we aim...

Referential expressions are used to introduce and continue reference to entities with par ticular referential properties, but also with particular discourse properties. In this paper we investigate the referential and discourse properties of pemarked indefi nite direct objects in Romanian, which are an instance of Diff erential Object Marking (DOM). Pe -marking is generally obligatory for defi ...

Evidence suggests that speakers can take account of the addressee's needs when referring. However, what representations drive the speaker's audience design has been less clear. This study aims to go beyond previous studies by investigating the interplay between the visual and linguistic context during audience design. Speakers repeated subordinate descriptions (e.g., firefighter) given in the p...

We focus on grounding (i.e., localizing or linking) referring expressions in images, e.g., “largest elephant standing behind baby elephant”. This is a general yet challenging vision-language task since it does not only require the localization of objects, but also the multimodal comprehension of context — visual attributes (e.g., “largest”, “baby”) and relationships (e.g., “behind”) that help t...

Relational rules such as 'same' or 'different' are mastered by humans and non-human primates and are considered as abstract conceptual thinking as they require relational learning beyond perceptual generalization. Here, we investigated whether an insect, the honeybee (Apis mellifera), can form a conceptual representation of an above/below spatial relationship. In experiment 1, bees were trained...

We learn words in ambiguous contexts, with multiple word candidates for any referent and multiple referent candidates for any word. For example, a child may see a boy, a bat, a ball, and a dog and hear “Look at the boy. The dog wants his ball.” This is the word-to-world mapping problem (e.g. Gleitman, 1990; Bloom, 2000; Smith, 2000). How could a learner who knows no words associate object names...

The goal of this research was to disentangle effects of phonotactic probability, the likelihood of occurrence of a sound sequence, and neighborhood density, the number of phonologically similar words, in lexical acquisition. Two word learning experiments were conducted with 4-year-old children. Experiment 1 manipulated phonotactic probability while holding neighborhood density and referent char...

The paradigm of referent tracking is based on a realist presupposition which rejects so-called negative entities (congenital absent nipple, and the like) as spurious. How, then, can a referent tracking-based Electronic Health Record deal with what are standardly called 'negative findings'? To answer this question we carried out an analysis of some 748 sentences drawn from patient charts and con...

The concepts that case-referent studies provide for the estimation of "relative risk" only if the illness is "rare", and that the rates and risks themselves are inestimable, are overly superficial and restrictve. The ratio of incidence densities (forces of morbidity)-and thereby the instantaneous risk-ratio-is estimable without any rarity-assumption. Long-term risk-ratio can be computed through...

Abstract In this paper, we present two experimental studies on reference of complex demonstratives. The results our experiments challenge the dominant view in philosophy language, according to which demonstrative is determined by speaker's intentions. first experiment shows that a context where there are candidates for referent—one speaker’s intention, other some “external” factors—people prefe...