[lingtalks] Lila Gleitman: Cog Sci Distinguished Speaker Thurs. 4/17, 4:00 PM

[Matt Leonard]

The UCSD Cognitive Science Department is pleased to announce our  
Spring 2008 distinguished speaker:

Lila Gleitman
Department of Psychology
University of Pennsylvania

Date: Thursday, 17 April, 2008
Time: 4:00 PM
Location: Cognitive Science Building, room 003

A reception will follow the talk in CSB 003

All are welcome!
----
Talk abstract:

                            Title:  Hard Words:  Why word learning is  
hard (and why it’s easy all the same)

             This talk begins by reviewing the philosophical  
literature on why word learning should be hard (e.g., Chomsky, 1957)  
if not impossible (e.g., Quine, 1960).  I then introduce two  
approaches that try to account for the changing character of lexical  
learning  over developmental time via either change in the mentality  
of the learner (“conceptual change”) or via the intrinsically ordered  
operations of a multi-cue learning machinery (“information change”).    
I then defend a version of the latter view (“syntactic  
bootstrapping”), with special attention to two kinds of words that  
make special trouble for word learners.  These are perspective-verb  
pairs, such as chase/flee, whose situational contexts coincide almost  
perfectly, and abstract verbs such as think/know, whose situational  
contexts are opaque.   I will document experimentally that learners  
increasingly recruit sophisticated linguistic representations of input  
data that can support learning of these Hard Words.    Finally, I will  
argue that what goes for the hard words goes for the easy ones as  
well, so a probabilistic multi-cue learning procedure is broadly at  
play in the acquisition of the lexicon.


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