韩国裸舞

CRLMB Distinguished Lecture by Dr. Lila Gleitman (U. Penn)

Abstract:

As a precondition for entering the human community, infants must efficiently and rapidly acquire the meanings of words Their first procedures for doing so rely heavily on noticing the contingencies between the occurrence of a sound (e.g. "shoe") with something observed (say, a shoe) in the environment. Because these links between sound and interpretive cue are notoriously uncertain and sometimes misleading, the procedure has widely been conceived as an associative-statistical one in which the choice of meaning is determined across several examples by recovering the features that recur most systematically with the sound (cf., Hume, 1740). Recent experimental results appear to support this position (Yu & Smith, 2007, inter alia). But several commentators and experimenters have pointed to the sheer rate and relative errorlessness of word learning as favoring a more insightful, one-trial, learning procedure that has been called "fast mapping" (Carey, 1978). In this talk I will present new experiments in word learning that strongly support the latter view. Discussion turns on the reasons why -- experiments aside -- this must be true. Prominent among such reasons is the "poverty of the stimulus" problem that also motivates theorizing about language acquisition at levels below (phonetics) and above (syntactic) the word form.

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Biography

Dr. Gleitman 听is a Professor Emerita of Psychology and Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, and an internationally-renowned expert on language acquisition and developmental psycholinguistics.

The impact of her research in language acquisition has been recognized by numerous organizations, and she has been elected as a fellow in the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academies of Science.

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