Jane B. Childers - Language and Concept Acquisition from Infancy Through Childhood: Learning from Multiple Exemplars

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As is true for many important things in life, this book grew out of an experience with failure. Specifically, I had just given (what I thought was) a riveting talk at a major conference detailing important new findings from my lab. In the question portion of the talk, a key question asked by an audience member was how a competing theory could explain my data, a theory I did not know much about. How could this occur? Easily. We all work within specific theoretical silos, knowing some about opposing views but (for many of us, I suspect) not knowing as much about the theories that are not within our frame of reference as we do about the theory we rely on. Thus, the idea for this book was born a book about distinct theoretical frameworks for the same phenomenon, infants and childrens use of a set of examples for learning. The goal was simple: to bring together differing perspectives on how children accomplish this type of unsupervised learning in a single book so that we could all easily learn from this set of examples! Specifically, this book brings into juxtaposition research from a range of theories (e.g., structural alignment, statistical learning, Bayesian learning). Particular theoretical commitments drive the types of questions we ask and the kinds of studies we design to what extent can different theories of example-based learning mutually inform each others commitments and phenomena?

Editing this book has provided me with a chance to learn and think about the connections among the theories in this area, and it should be openly acknowledged that not all theories are represented. Yet, lets embark on this comparison of comparison theories and see what we can learn by comparing theories to each other! Based on the growing evidence of the power of learning from examples exemplified in these chapters, by the end of this book, I predict that we all will leave with a richer understanding of the nature of learning. Happy reading!

The first group to be acknowledged is the group of researchers who contributed chapters. This was my first experience editing a book, and their patience and generosity in sharing their research and ideas are greatly appreciated.

Additionally, this book would not have been completed without the guidance, support, and mentoring of Laura Namy and Susan Graham. They were extremely helpful in this process, and our periodic long-distance Skype calls were invaluable. Many thanks to both of them!