Exemplar Retrieval Without Overhypothesis Induction: Limits of Distributional Sequence Learning in Early Word Learning

ArXi:2604.05243v1 Announce Type: cross Background: Children do not simply learn that balls are round and blocks are square. They learn that shape is the kind of feature that tends to define object categories -- a second-order generalisation known as an overhypothesis [1, 2]. What kind of learning mechanism is sufficient for this inductive leap? Methods: We trained autoregressive transformer language models (3.4M-25.6M parameters) on synthetic corpora in which shape is the stable feature dimension across categories, with eight conditions controlling for alternative explanations.