Connectionists: Caroline Rowland speaking on January 24 in Developing Minds global online lecture series

[Jochen Triesch]

Dear colleagues,

On January 24, the Developing Minds global online lecture series is proud to host Caroline Rowland from rom the Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands, speaking on: "What predicts how quickly children learn language?“

The live event will take place via zoom at:
Wednesday, January 24, 2024
09:00 am EST (Eastern Standard Time, US)
14:00 UTC (Universal Coordinated Time)
15:00 CET (Central European Time)
23:00 JST (Japan Standard Time)

The zoom link/credentials are:
https://uni-frankfurt.zoom-x.de/j/6960577736?omn=62362490041 
Meeting-ID: 696 057 7736

Abstract
There are large individual differences in the speed with which children acquire language in the early years. A popular approach is to attribute this variance to differences in the quality and quantity of the child's interactions and input; for example, to the amount of child directed speech or the number of conversational turns that adults and children use in interaction. However, even the strongest findings report only small to moderate effect sizes of linguistic input. In recent years we've been applying a constructivist approach to explaining individual variation to see how far it can take us. In this approach, language development is conceptualized as emerging from rich pre-linguistic communicative and cognitive abilities, with individual learning trajectories being shaped by interactions between environmental input, the child’s current knowledge, and the child’s learning and processing mechanisms. In this talk I illustrate some of our findings from this approach, using data from the longitudinal Language 0-5 Project, in which we followed 90 children from 6 months to 4 and a half years old, and assessed the impact of a range of socio-cognitive, cognitive, and environmental factors on individual differences in language growth.

Short Bio:
Caroline Rowland is Director of the Language Development Department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen and Professor of First Language Acquisition at Radboud University. Her research focuses on how children learn to communicate with language, how the developing brain supports this process, and how it is affected by cross-linguistic, cultural and individual variation. She takes a multiple methods approach -  experimental work, naturalistic data analysis and computer modelling – to test the predictions of different models of the child’s learning mechanism. Her book, Understanding Child Language Acquisition, is an introduction to the most important research on child language acquisition over the last fifty years, and to some of the most influential theories in the field.

The talk will be recorded and made available for later viewing. For more information on the talk series and recordings of previous events, please visit: https://sites.google.com/view/developing-minds-series/home 

Best regards,
Jochen Triesch

--
Prof. Dr. Jochen Triesch
Johanna Quandt Chair for Theoretical Life Sciences
Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies and
Goethe University Frankfurt
http://fias.uni-frankfurt.de/~triesch/
Tel: +49 (0)69 798-47531
Fax: +49 (0)69 798-47611


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