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Updated: May 10, 2026

Lexical Decision Task for Studying Written Word Recognition in Adults with and without Dementia or Mild Cognitive Impairment
Published on: June 25, 2019
Stochastic dynamics of lexicon learning in an uncertain and nonuniform world
Rainer Reisenauer1, Kenny Smith, Richard A Blythe
1Physik-Department, Technische Universität München, James-Franck-Strasse 1, 85748 Garching, Germany.
Abstract:
We study the time taken by a language learner to correctly identify the meaning of all words in a lexicon under conditions where many plausible meanings can be inferred whenever a word is uttered. We show that the most basic form of cross-situational learning--whereby information from multiple episodes is combined to eliminate incorrect meanings--can perform badly when words are learned independently and meanings are drawn from a nonuniform distribution. If learners further assume that no two words share a common meaning, we find a phase transition between a maximally efficient learning regime, where the learning time is reduced to the shortest it can possibly be, and a partially efficient regime where incorrect candidate meanings for words persist at late times. We obtain exact results for the word-learning process through an equivalence to a statistical mechanical problem of enumerating loops in the space of word-meaning mappings.
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