Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We implemented the connectionist model of social-pragmaticword learning (Caza & Knott, 2012) to test the hypothesis thatreduced joint attention between infant and mother wouldincrease the difference in acquisition between nouns andverbs as observed in Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Theratio of objects to actions in the observed event stream wasmanipulated to create an original noun-verb asymmetry. Tensimulations were run for each of the combinations of threeconditions of communicative reliability and two conditions ofunfiltered random associative learning, which is regarded bysome researchers as the primary mechanism of languagelearning in ASD. The simulations indicated that the reductionin the reliability of communicative actions does not lead toincreased noun-verb asymmetry within the originally plannedtraining epochs. A trend in the predicted direction appearedtoward the end of training, suggesting that further simulationsmay help resolve the issue within the current architecture.