Home > Events > CogSci Colloqium: Michael Frank (Stanford)
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CogSci Colloqium: Michael Frank (Stanford)

Time: 
Thursday, September 07, 2017 - 3:30 PM to 5:30 PM
Location: 
Bioscience Research Building 1103

Title: Bigger data about smaller people: Studying children's language learning at scale. 

Abstract: How do children acquire a language? Decades of work have provided a roadmap of principles and mechanism for early language learning as attested by small-scale laboratory tasks. But there is not yet a convincing empirical synthesis of this work that addresses both the systematicity and ubiquity of language learning and the variability of learning trajectories across children. In this talk I will describe such a synthesis. This research integrates high-density data from individual children learning a single language and summary data from tens of thousands of children learning more than a dozen languages. Taken together, the data support a hybrid picture in which children slowly accumulate knowledge in rich social contexts but also show evidence for surprisingly fast grammatical abstractions. 

Bio: Michael Frank is an associate professor of Pscyhology at Stanford. He did his undergraduate degree at Stanford in Symbolic Systems and his PhD work at MIT. He is broadly interested in the relationship between language and cognition, especially as it relates to children's early language development.