Dr Naomi Havron | Syntactic adaptation as a mechanism that drives and supports language acquisition

Guest Lecture

  • Date: Feb 20, 2018
  • Time: 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Dr Naomi Havron
  • Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France
  • Location: MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
  • Room: Wilhelm Wundt Room (A400)
Adults quickly adapt to a different distribution of syntactic structures in a new linguistic environment: Structures that are used more often in a given situation come to be processed faster. This has been proposed to happen through error-driven learning: When adults’ expectations are violated, they change their predictions to better fit the new information. In this talk, I will claim that syntactic adaptation also exists in children, and may be a key mechanism in the understanding of language acquisition. To test this claim, we examined whether syntactic adaptation is active in children, and whether it can guide novel word learning. We found that syntactic adaptation is active in preschoolers’ interpretation of ambiguous sentences; and that 3-4-year-olds use this mechanism to infer the meaning of novel words. The results attest to children’s remarkable ability to adapt their expectations to the properties of their linguist environment, and to use their recent experience to learn.

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