Jesse Snedeker, Ph.D, Department of Psychology, Harvard University

时间： 2017-05-25 09:00 - 11:00

地点： Room 1113, Wang Kezhen Building

Language development is marked by a predictable sequence of milestones: single words are followed by short telegraphic utterances, which are rapidly replaced by more complex sentences. Are these changes driven by cognitive development and maturation?  Or are they a by-product of the learning process?  We have explored these questions by examining the acquisition of English in internationally-adopted preschoolers. Unlike most second language learners, these children quickly lose their first language and have little access to bilingual informants. Thus they must acquire English from child-directed speech, much like an infant does.  However, they are considerably older when they begin this process, allowing us to disentangle linguistic experience and age.  Our work examines lexical development, syntactic development, and the relationship between language and thought.

2017-05-25

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2017-05-25