Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent analysis of a corpus of infant-perspective head-camera images found an extremely right-skewed frequencydistribution of objects present in 8- to 10-month-old infants’ visual environments (Clerkin, et al., 2017). Furthermore, theobjects most pervasively present in these scenes have names normatively acquired first by learners of English. New analysesshow that the names for these objects occur only sparsely in infants’ environments, and object name frequency is not correlatedwith object visual frequency. Therefore, we designed a simple associative model simulating word-object co-occurrence in orderto investigate how visual pervasiveness without high-frequency naming could lead to learning of word-object correspondences.With random sampling from distributions reflecting the actual frequency of words and objects in infants’ environments, we findthat the most frequent objects have a distinct advantage over less frequent objects in their conditional probability. This suggestsvisual experience with objects may be the principal predictor of early word-referent learning.