CAT LECTURE by DR LOUKIA TAXITARI (Universität Potsdam & CAT):
Gavagai! – Or Constraint-Guided Learning during Lexical Development
The usual CAT rule applies for this event: Everyone is welcome!
When?
Monday, 7 February 2011: 18.00–19.30.
Where?
At the University of Cyprus Main Campus in Nicosia (i.e. the "old" campus on Kallipoleos): room E 010.
Who?
Dr Loukia Taxitari is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Psychology at the University of Potsdam and an active member of CAT.
What?
This talk is concerned with the problem of induction in language acquisition. Several theories aim to account for the manner in which infants discover the meaning of words, in the midst of information constantly being bombarded with by the environment. The first part of this talk will look at the different theories out there, with a special focus on the existence of constraints, which guide infants at discovering the correct meanings of words during the word learning task. As a case study, we will focus on one of those constraints - the taxonomic constraint, which guides infants to attach words to groups of objects. Eventually most words in the language, with the exception of proper nouns, come to signify categories of objects, and not just individual instances. But how do infants come to appreciate this and what is the developmental pattern characterising the acquisition of the extension of words? In the second part of the talk, new research investigating the taxonomic constraint in infants at the end of their first year of life will be presented. Infants participated in an Intermodal Preferential Looking Task in which they were trained with two object-label pairings, and were then tested for word learning with the same objects and for taxonomic generalisations using new objects which resembled the training objects. The evidence suggests that at the end of their first year infants are able to attach labels to objects, but fail in making taxonomic generalisations. Implications of these findings will be discussed.