<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Reminder: TOMORROW 4/17 at 4:00 PM in CSB 003!<div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>****NOTE: There are still 3 slots left during the day on 4/17 for individual meetings with Prof. Gleitman. Please email Matt Leonard (<a href="mailto:mkleonard@cogsci.ucsd.edu">mkleonard@cogsci.ucsd.edu</a>) if you're interested.****</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>The UCSD Cognitive Science Department is pleased to announce our Spring 2008 distinguished speaker:<div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div><b>Lila Gleitman</b> </div><div>Department of Psychology </div><div>University of Pennsylvania</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>Date: Thursday, 17 April, 2008</div><div>Time: 4:00 PM</div><div>Location: Cognitive Science Building, room 003</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>A reception will follow the talk in CSB 003</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>All are welcome!</div><div>----</div><div>Talk abstract:</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div> Title: Hard Words: Why word learning is hard (and why it’s easy all the same)<br> <br> 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 <i>chase/flee</i>, whose situational contexts coincide almost perfectly, and abstract verbs such as <i>think/know</i>, 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.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div></div></body></html>