This ACLC Seminar will be in hybrid form. To join online, please follow this link: https://uva-live.zoom.us/j/3687614509

Abstract:

You’ve got THIS! Demonstratives as a multimodal pathway to early word learning

Function words like ‘I’ or ‘some’ are highly frequent in children’s linguistic input but are not learned early, so we ask: do they play any role in early word learning? Here we test a novel hypothesis that demonstratives, a universal class of function words like THIS and THAT in English, generate word learning opportunities for young children because they provide multimodal cues to joint attention on referents. Combining head-mounted eye-tracking with machine-learning modeling of naturalistic interactions between parent and child (19 months), we show that demonstratives provide augmented inputs that scaffold word learning. Our results suggest that these function words orchestrate attentional dynamics in multimodal social interaction, expanding long-standing learning