A Unified Model of Lexical Acquisition and Lexical Access

This paper presents the first unified model of how adults and young children use whatever words they know to segment utterances and isolate novel words. This model is based on a conception of the language processor as a system for reasoning under conditions of uncertainty about the language being heard, the linguistic structure of the current utterance, and the portion of the current utterance that has not yet been heard. The fundamental hypothesis is that the language processor performs both acquisition tasks and sentence analysis tasks simultaneous, by computing the most probable combination of hypotheses about the language and hypotheses about the current utterance, given the available information. Within this framework, a specific processing is task modeled by (a) making a hypothesis about the information that is most important for performing that task, (b) formalizing the remaining uncertainty in probabilistic terms, Brent, Lexical acquisition and lexical access 1 and (c) derivi..