An artificial intelligence (AI) model has learnt to recognize words such as ‘crib’ and ‘ball’, by studying headcam recordings of a tiny fraction of a single baby’s life.
The results suggest that AI can help us to understand how humans learn, says Wai Keen Vong, co-author of the study and a researcher in AI at New York University. This has previously been unclear, because other language-learning models such as ChatGPT learn on billions of data points, which is not comparable to the real-world experiences of an infant, says Vong. “We don’t get given the internet when we’re born.”
The authors hope that the research, reported in Science on 1 February1, will feed into long-standing debates about how children learn language. The AI learnt only by building associations between the images and words it saw together; it was not programmed with any other prior knowledge about language. That challenges some cognitive-science theories that, to attach meaning to words, babies need some innate knowledge about how language works, says Vong.
The study is “a fascinating approach” to understanding early language acquisition in children, says Heather Bortfeld, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Merced.
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