Miniature Language Acquisition: A Touchstone for Cognitive Science

Cognitive Science, whose genesis was interdisciplinary, shows signs of reverting to a disjoint collection of elds. This paper presents a compact, theory-free task that inherently requires an integrated solution. The basic problem is learning a subset of an arbitrary natural language from picture-sentence pairs. We describe a very speci c instance of this task and show how it presents fundamental (but not impossible) challenges to several areas of cognitive science including vision, language, inference and learning.