Home > Events > HESP Seminar, Alexa Romberg (HDQM, CASL)
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HESP Seminar, Alexa Romberg (HDQM, CASL)

Time: 
Wednesday, October 07, 2015 - 12:00 PM
Location: 
Lefrak 2208

Alexa Romberg

Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology (HDQM) & CASL
University of Maryland
Wednesday, October 7, 2015
12:00-1:00 pm
Lefrak Hall 2208

Title: Cognitive mechanisms supporting cross-situational word learning

 
Abstract: 
Referential utterances are by their nature ambiguous, requiring language learners to extract information from multiple sources to make sense of them. These sources include linguistic structure, the structure of the physical/visual world and the way in which these information sources relate to one another. One way to help resolve these ambiguities is to aggregate information across multiple instances or contexts in order to determine which elements of the input predict one another. When studied in the context of word learning, such aggregation has been referred to as "cross-situational" word learning. While there is good evidence at this point that infants, children and adults will readily link words and objects that reliably co-occur, the mechanisms that enable such learning have yet to be fully characterized and have been the subject of debate in the literature (e.g., Medina et al., 2011; Trueswell et al., 2013; Smith & Yu, 2012; Romberg & Yu, 2013). The studies I will discuss in this talk investigate the ways that different cognitive mechanisms such as statistical learning, hypothesis testing and visual attention may support cross-situational word learning.