Standing on the shoulders of infant giants

25 stycznia 2017 roku Laboratorium Neurokognitywne w Interdyscyplinarnym Centrum Nowoczesnych Technologii organizuje międzynarodowe seminarium. W styczniowym seminarium gościem będzie dr Alex Cristia z paryskiego Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, ENS-DEC, EHESS i  BabyLabu w Paryżu.

Seminarium rozpocznie się 25 stycznia o godzinie 11.00 w sali I, parter Collegium Minus UMK (“Harmonijka”), ul. Fosa Staromiejska 1a. Alex Cristia wygłosi wykład Standing on the shoulders of infant giants: How to utilize others’ research to inform your theory and practice.

Alex Cristia

Standing on the shoulders of infant giants: How to utilize others’ research to inform your theory and practice

One of the first tasks thought to be facing infant language learners involves learning the sound system of their native language, its phonology. A mainstream explanation for this process holds that infants keep track of the syntagmatic (and/or paradigmatic) distributions of sounds in their input. In this talk, I will start by reviewing evidence from an individual variation study [1] and a laboratory learning experiment [2] whose results are in line with this proposal. A single study, however, well-constructed it may be, is only one measurement of an measurement of the underlying phenomenon. In this context, “big data” approaches can provide us with a more accurate estimation of the reliability and strength of certain experimental approaches. I discuss the complementary strengths of two avenues for big data available to those doing infant research: meta-analyses [3,5,7,8] and (large) cross-lab collaborations [4,6,9]. Meta-analytic methods help us make the most of previously published research, informing us on which procedures are most likely to be informative, and whether a given phenomenon is robustly measurable. Cross-lab collaborations, for their part, can help us gain a firmer grasp on the empirical measurement of infants’ developing language skills, while reducing the risks of working with an intrinsically variable population.

Rezerwacja uczestnictwa