Psychology Program Presents

Follow That Baby!: Using Naturalistic Observation to Enrich Word Learning Research
 

How children learn to link (or “map”) a label to its meaning has been a primary focus of word learning research. Most—if not all—researchers agree that there is more to word learning than mapping. Children must learn the contexts in which words are used, the relationships between words, and more. And yet, our research programs and methods are still dominated by the mapping problem. One way move forward from this mapping focus is to think from a baby’s perspective.  Recent technological advances have made it possible to collect, store, and share unprecedented naturalistic audio/video corpora that document the first years of a baby’s life. These new datasets have led to an explosion in exploratory, descriptive, naturalistic studies that aim to unpack how infants learn language out in the real world. In this talk, I present data from two descriptive case studies that use the unique SAYcam database, which comprises headcam footage from three babies, sampled two hours per week across the first two years of life. Both studies unveil new characteristics of early lexical input, demonstrating how descriptive, naturalistic work can enrich word learning research.
 

---

For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail [email protected].

Time: 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: Preston Theater

Subscribe: Save this Event: Subscribe / .ics File