FEATURING
Dr. Mahesh Srinivasan, Associate Professor of Psychology and Affiliate Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley.
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TITLE
Re-imagining how children learn the meanings of words
ABSTRACT
Learning a language requires children to develop exquisitely complex and subtle intuitions about the meanings of words, based on limited data and minimal explicit instruction. In this talk I will show how my work motivates a re-thinking of two widely-accepted solutions for how children learn words. The first and main part of the talk will interrogate one classic solution—the idea that children are guided by certain assumptions about the meanings of words that greatly simplify the learning problem—in particular, the assumption that a new word will have only one meaning, corresponding to a single taxonomic category. I will argue that this theory does not make sense of why most common words across languages express multiple distinct but related meanings, because it predicts that children should struggle to learn these words. Instead, I will present evidence suggesting that, rather than impeding learning, polysemy helps children overcome some of the challenges inherent to learning new words. The second part of my talk will re-visit another long-standing idea about how children learn words: that, in direct conversations with children, caregivers provide labels that follow their children’s focus of attention, as well as other important clues to the referents of new words. An extension of this idea is that children should learn little from speech that they overhear, which often lacks these features and requires attending to interactions among others. Challenging this prediction, I will present evidence of early word knowledge—including knowledge that could only be learned from overhearing—among infants from a Mayan community in Southern Mexico who are rarely spoken to directly. Taken together, these two lines of work show how theories of language learning can be re-imagined by broadening the scope of research to capture the complexity of the knowledge that children have to acquire, and the diversity of contexts in which they develop this knowledge.
BIO
Dr. Mahesh Srinivasan is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Affiliate Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He directs the UC Berkeley Language and Cognitive Development Laboratory, which explores how linguistic, cognitive, and social abilities arise and interact during human development and across different cultures. He is also co-scientific director of the Psychology and Economics of Poverty Initiative at the Center for Effective Global Action. His work has been published in journals including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cognition, Child Development, and Developmental Science, and has been supported by the National Science Foundation, John Templeton Foundation, and the James S. McDonnell Foundation.
Annually the Department of Psychology hosts a Colloquia Series throughout the academic year. This exciting program brings us together outside of the classroom to have conversations with the speakers we’ve invited to our campus to share their ideas. You’ll have the chance to hear from international speakers on a wide range of psychology research.
