Learning Language from Other People

Google Tech Talk March 25, 2012 (more info below) Presented by Mike Frank ABSTRACT How do children learn their first words? One possibility is that, even from early infancy, children's word learning is driven by a desire to share information with others - to communicate, in other words. This provocative hypothesis has an increasing amount of support in the empirical literature. My research has been devoted to understanding the empirical and formal consequences for early word learning of children's orientation towards communication. I'll show a formal framework for thinking about communicative word learning and then highlight data from an in-depth investigation of a single child's word learning and from the large-scale dynamics apparent in children's vocabularies at the scale of tens of thousands of kids. Bio: Michael C. Frank is Associate Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. He earned his BS from Stanford University in Symbolic Systems in 2005 and his PhD from MIT in Brain and Cognitive Sciences in 2010. He studies children's language learning and how it interacts with their developing understanding of the social world, using behavioral experiments, computational tools, and novel measurement methods including large-scale web-based studies, eye-tracking, and head-mounted cameras.