As discussed in the previous section, results from the human experiments as well as our computational simulations show that the referent of a novel target word can be selected based on the previous knowledge about the present objects and their names.
upon hearing ball, the model can confidently retrieve its meaning ball, which is the one with the highest probability p(m|ball ) among all possible meanings m. In such a case, if ball is present in the scene, the model can easily pick it as the referent of the familiar target name, without processing the other objects in the scene.