Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Word learning research has shown that learners constrain thehypothesis space for word meanings by using multiplesources of information, such as cross-situational regularitiesof word-context co-occurrences or syntactic cues, like thenumber of arguments. These studies typically focus on wordmeaning development where these cues can be helpful but notnecessary. As such, it sheds little light on the acquisition ofanaphors, which requires tracking syntactic dependenciesacross situations. To test whether or how learners track thisinformation, we conducted a novel anaphor learningexperiment with English and Japanese speakers, manipulatingcross-situational regularities in anaphors and their syntacticdependencies. Results show both English and Japanesespeakers closely track the frequency of interpretivepossibilities for novel anaphors. However, they demonstratedifficulties learning long-distance reflexives, which arecompatible with either local or non-local antecedents. Thissuggests that successful anaphor learning requires more thancross-situational regularities of interpretive possibilities.