2/26 Psychology Colloquium: Dr. Dan Swingley
The next psychology colloquium is scheduled for Wednesday – February 26th at 3:30pm in BOUS A106. Dr. Dan Swingley from University of Pennsylvania will be presenting his talk titled "Babies learning which words? How to characterize the foundations of language development". We hope that you will join us!
Abstract: How does language learning get off the ground in infancy? Cognitive psychology used to have a good account of this. First, babies use distributional learning to acquire their language's speech sounds, the phonemes used for representing and recognizing speech. Next, infants engage in statistical learning over these phonological representations, discovering word-forms and distributional facts. Then, infants develop the social-cognitive skills that enable them to learn the meanings of these word-forms, which become the child's first true words.
This narrative seemed sensible, but it's probably wrong. I will suggest an alternative account of early language development that is less sequential and more messy, focusing on word learning. In addition, I will argue that real progress in this area of psychology is imminent, and that much of this progress will come from looking outside the lab.
The remaining colloquium scheduled is listed below. All talks will take place in BOUS A106 at 3:30pm on Wednesday’s unless otherwise noted.
March 11, 2020
Dr. Robin Vallacher, Department of Psychology, Florida Atlantic University.
Title: TBA
March 25, 2020
Dr. Robert Astur, Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Connecticut
Tenure Talk
Title: TBA
April 1, 2020
Dr. Inge-Marie Eigsti, Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Connecticut
Title: TBA
April 22, 2020
Dr. Ian Stevenson, Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Connecticut
Tenure Talk
Title: TBA
psychology.uconn.edu
For more information, contact: Shu Jiang at shu.2.jiang@uconn.edu