Word learning

Word learning is acquisition of associations and rules connecting linguistic forms to meanings and uses. Recognizing a familiar sound, inferring a referent and generalizing a word to new situations are distinct tasks within language acquisition.

Learning word–referent mappings by integrating information across individually ambiguous encounters. Recurrent co-occurrence can favour a mapping even when no single encounter uniquely identifies it. A target-looking preference need not distinguish parallel associative accumulation from testing and revising a candidate hypothesis.^[ref]