ABSTRACT
Young children are so adept at learning words that they often learn an object name from hearing a single object named. For example, a 2-year-old who sees a tractor for the first time and is told that it is a tractor is likely, from that moment forward, to recognize and name a variety of other tractors. How is it that young children do this? How do they know which of the object’s properties are relevant to what it is called? In this chapter, I propose the answer lies, in part, in the self-organizing processes of attention—processes that fuse past experience and immediate context to create learning biases on-line.
