Talk Title: How to Grow a Lexicon: Evidence from Babies & their Worlds

Abstract: While a longstanding view in language development holds that infants don't understand words until they begin talking (around age 1), recent research in our lab and others has revealed that infants begin understanding words months earlier. In this talk I will explore two branches of my lab’s work that tackle the mechanisms of early language development, largely focused on building the early lexicon. First, I will discuss eyetracking data revealing infants’ initially imature expectations about how words sound and what they mean, and how their representations eventually become more adult-like over infancy and toddlerhood. Synthesizing across studies, I will discuss recent results showing a robust, non-linear, and arguably qualitative improvements in infants’ real-time word comprehension just after the first birthday. Second, drawing from SEEDLingS, my lab’s audio and video corpus of home recordings, I will argue that this “comprehension boost” is not well-explained by changes in language input for common words, but rather, by postulating that infants learn to take better advantage of relatively stable input data. I will propose complementary theoretical accounts of what makes older infants “better learners.” Finally, I will also discuss the dynamics of language learning in infants who are blind and infants who are Deaf/Hard of Hearing, considering how their unique perceptual experiences dovetail with their accruing linguistic knowledge.

Bio: Dr. Bergelson is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences in Harvard University’s Psychology Department. She received her PhD in 2013 from UPenn, completed postdoctoral work at the University of Rochester, and was a professor at Duke prior to Harvard (where she moved in 2023). Her work has been funded by the NSF, NIH, NEH, and FDA as well as various intramural and extramural foundations. She has published over 50 articles, and has received early career awards from the Fed. of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, the American Psychology Foundation, the International Society for Infant Studies, the Association for Psychological Science, and Forbes Magazine, among others. Her work focuses on how young children learn language from the world around them, with a particular focus on experimental and observational measures of infants’ during the early phases of word learning.

I am happy to send copies of any of our articles upon email request (or you can snag them from my Publications page).

Followed by a reception with food and drink in 3^rd floor atrium