Winter Storm Lunch Talk: Lucas Butler (HDQM)
Join us for the sixth faculty lunch talk at Winter Storm 2016. Lunch will be provided by Chris Heffner.
Speaker: Lucas Butler (HDQM)
Title: Communicative Intent and Social Learning in Early Childhood
Abstract: A critical tool for early learners is the ability to draw rich inductive inferences about the world on the basis of limited evidence. But evaluating what evidence licenses such inferences, and modulating their strength and scope, can pose major inductive challenges. In this talk I will present a series of studies investigating how children tap into the wealth of knowledge of others around them in order to guide this inference process. In particular, I will discuss how children's sensitivity to communicative intent--their recognition that someone intends to communicate with them in order to convey information relevant information--can have a profound impact on their inductive inferences. I will close with a broad overview of what a comprehensive view of social learning in early childhood might look like, including highlighting areas where the language science community and language science research might have a particularly important role.
