Young children can sometimes acquire new vocabulary words with only limited, indirect exposure (Carey & Bartlett, 1978). We propose that structural alignment processes lead to fluent detection of commonalities and differences that facilitate incidental word learning. To test this, we adapted the Carey and Bartlett paradigm, varying the alignability of the objects that 4year-olds saw while heari...

Machine Learning and Inference methods have become ubiquitous in our attempt to induce more abstract representations of natural language text, visual scenes, and other messy, naturally occurring data, and support decisions that depend on it. However, learning models for these tasks is difficult partly because generating the necessary supervision signals for it is costly and does not scale. This...

This paper surveys a number of theories of word meaning acquisition from context; it discusses possible (text-dependent or text-independent) constraints or biases that might help in the process, and also factors like student ability and the strength of contextual support that aaect the learning task. It also reviews incidental learning from context during normal reading.

This paper summarizes recent psychological research and theory on the topic of consciousness and looks at three questions in second language learning related to the role of consciousness in input processing: whether conscious awareness at the level of 'noticing' is necessary for language learning (the subliminal learning issue); whether it is necessary to consciously 'pay attention' in order to...

........................................................................................................................... 2 Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................ 3 Table of contents .............................................................................................................. 4 List of figur...