title: Knowledge embedded in process: the self-organization of skilled noun learning.
abstract: Young children's skilled generalization of newly learned nouns to new instances has become the battleground for two very different approaches to cognition. This debate is a proxy for a larger dispute in cognitive science and cognitive development: cognition as rule-like amodal propositions, on the one hand, or as embodied, modal, and dynamic processes on the other. After a brief consideration of this theoretical backdrop, we turn to the specific task set before us: an overview of the Attentional Learning Account (ALA) of children's novel noun generalizations, the constrained set of experimental results to be explained, and our explanation of them. We conclude with a consideration of what all of this implies for a theory of cognitive development.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309, USA. colunga@colorado.edu
authors.forename: Eliana
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Colunga
authors.forename: Linda B
authors.initials: LB
authors.lastname: Smith
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D014706:Verbal Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D014825:Vocabulary