Talk
Title: TBA
Abstract: TBA
Title: Clean Mapping: A sketchy story about how conceptual structure could shape language acquisition and some experiments suggesting that it just might be true
Abstract:
According to Tomasello, the emergence of pointing played a revolutionary role in human phylogeny, by making possible new forms of coordinated hunting activities, pedagogy, and language acquisition. On Tomasello’s account, the emergence of pointing is itself supposed to be the result of an earlier socio-cognitive revolution, in which our early hominin ancestors developed new cognitive mechanisms for communication, and new forms of prosocial motivation.
Abstract: Studies of language input and language development in monolingual and bilingual populations reveal how children use input to learn language, and thus they reveal what children need from input in order to learn language. Findings have implications for understanding individual and between-group differences in children’s language skill and for designing interventions and policy aimed at closing language gaps.
Erika Hoff is a professor of Psychology at Florida Atlantic University.
Abstract: A number of researchers have proposed that children gradually acquire abstract phonological categories such as phonemes as vocabulary size increases. This claim is of particular interest because phonemic awareness and vocabulary size are the two best predictors of literacy success.
Abstract: Infant vocal development reveals foundations for language, starting from the first month of life, and even before full-term birth in infants 2-months premature. These non-cry, spontaneously produced “protophones” are explored and elaborated in vocal play and face-to-face interaction, yielding rich interchanges for which there is no known precedent in non-humans.
Probabilistic models of human cognition have been widely successful at capturing the ways that people represent and reason with uncertain knowledge. In this talk I will explore the ways that this probabilistic approach can be applied to systematic and productive reasoning – in particular, natural language pragmatics and semantics. I will first describe how probabilistic programming languages provide a formal tool encompassing probabilistic uncertainty and compositional structure. I'll illustrate with a examples from inductive reasoning and social cognition.
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