Miniature Language Acquisition: A Touchstone for Cognitive Science

Abstract

Cognitive Science, whose genesis was interdisciplinary, shows signs of reverting to a disjoint collection of fields. This paper presents a compact, theory-free task that inherently requires an integrated solution. The basic problem is learning a subset of an arbitrary natural language from picture-sentence pairs. We describe a very specific instance of this task and show how it presents fundamental (but not impossible) challenges to several areas of cognitive science including vision, language, inference and learning. 1 Introduction touchstone (tuch' ston'). n. 1. a black siliceous stone used to test the purity of gold and silver by the color of the streak produced on it by rubbing it with either metal. 2. a test or criterion for the qualities of a thing. ---Syn. 2. standard, measure, model, pattern. Among the things that cognitive science has studied most are visual perception, language, inference, and learning [Posner, 1989]. However, these are often studied as if they were isolat...