More than words: Developmental and psycholinguistic investigations of the building blocks of language
Description
Why are children better language learners than adults despite being worse at a range of other cognitive tasks? Many accounts focus on the cognitive or neurological differences between children and adults. Here, I focus on the way prior knowledge impacts the building blocks children and adults use. I explore the role of multiword sequences in explaining L1–L2 differences to argue that children are more likely than adults to rely on them in learning. While words are often seen as the basic building blocks of language (e.g., Pinker, 1991), there is growing theoretical interest and empirical evidence for the role of multiword units in language. I draw on developmental, psycholinguistic and computational findings to show that multiword units are integral building blocks in language; that such units are facilitative for learning certain grammatical relations; and that adult learners rely on them less than children, a pattern that can explain some of the differences between L1 and L2 learning. I discuss implications for models of language representation and learning.
Speaker Bio
Prof. Arnon is a linguist and cognitive scientist. She is an Associate Professor at the Psychology Department in the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Her main interests are first language acquisition, learning theory, psycholinguistics, and the differences between first and second language learning. She has a BA in linguistics from Tel-Aviv university (Summa cum Laude), an MSc in psycholinguistics from the University of Edinburgh (with distinction), and a PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University. Her research lies at the intersection of Linguistics, Psychology, and Cognitive Science and uses a variety of experimental methods to explore how language is learned and how learning changes as a function of prior knowledge and experience. She is currently a visiting scholar in the Gibson lab at MIT.