Dr. Mahesh Srinivasan\, Associate Professor of Psychology and Affiliate Profess or of Linguistics at the University of California\, Berkeley.
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Re-imagining ho w children learn the meanings of words
Learning a la nguage requires children to develop exquisitely complex and subtle intuitio ns 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 an d main part of the talk will interrogate one classic solution—the idea that children are guided by certain assumptions about the meanings of words tha t greatly simplify the learning problem—in particular\, the assumption that a new word will have only one meaning\, corresponding to a single taxonomi c category. I will argue that this theory does not make sense of why most c ommon 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 le arning\, polysemy helps children overcome some of the challenges inherent t o learning new words. The second part of my talk will re-visit another long -standing idea about how children learn words: that\, in direct conversatio ns with children\, caregivers provide labels that follow their children’s f ocus of attention\, as well as other important clues to the referents of ne w words. An extension of this idea is that children should learn little fro m speech that they overhear\, which often lacks these features and requires attending to interactions among others. Challenging this prediction\, I wi ll present evidence of early word knowledge—including knowledge that could only be learned from overhearing—among infants from a Mayan community in So uthern 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 knowledg e that children have to acquire\, and the diversity of contexts in which th ey develop this knowledge.
Dr. Mahesh Srinivasan is an Associ ate Professor of Psychology and Affiliate Professor of Linguistics at the U niversity 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 Init iative at the Center for Effective Global Action. His work has been publish ed in journals including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences\, Cognition\, Child Development\, and Developmental Science\, and has been su pported by the National Science Foundation\, John Templeton Foundation\, an d the James S. McDonnell Foundation.
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