Simulating Infants’ Word-to-Object Mapping : The impact of focusing attention to relevant objects and reducing noise when learning language

Abstract: This project used a computer program to simulate how infants may learn new languages. The project drew inspiration from a report written by Jeffrey Mark Siskind in 1997, in which he described some main problems that infants face when learning a new language. The experiments conducted in this project relate to recent discoveries by Aimee E. Stahl and Lisa Feigenson suggesting that infants show an ability to focus their learning to objects in their surroundings that may be especially relevant at the moment. The computer program was then run with different settings to see how its ability to learn new words was affected by how many objects it was presented with when hearing a word and how often the objects presented were irrelevant to the word heard. Both factors affected the learning rate significantly.