ABSTRACT
Multiple cues, external to the learner, are prevalent in situations where children are acquiring language. The intersensory redundancy hypothesis accounts for the mutual operation of extrinsic cues to word learning but does not provide a seamless account for how intrinsic word learning heuristics or biases could align with these external cues. The solution to the problem of forming word-referent mappings has traditionally been discussed in terms of learner-internal biases to form constraints that limit selection of the referent from the environment and that govern the extension of the word. W. V. O. Quine's statement of the problem focused on the size of the set of possible referents but ignores a further complication for word learning. Considering the multiple information sources available from this extra-linguistic, multi-modal, interactive perspective enriches our understanding of the learning situation and also reveals the complexity and subtlety of the learning that the child applies to navigate this landscape of information.
