Alayo in Frontiers with Naomi and Bill

Assessment of knowledgeability and group membership influences infant word learning.

Now in Frontiers in Psychology: Developmental Psychology, "Social inference may guide early lexical learning" by Alayo Tripp *19, currently a postdoctoral fellow with Benjamin Munson at Minnesota, with former advisors Naomi Feldman and Bill Idsardi. The paper shows that infant language acquisition – and specifically, behavior in certain experiments involving labeling of objects – is modeled more effectively when beliefs about the knowledgeability and group membership of speakers are taken into account. The paper builds on Alayo's dissertation at Maryland, An Affiliative Model of Early Lexical Learning.