Psychology Seminar: Sho Tsuji (University of Tokyo)

How infants learn about language from social interaction

Human infants are prolific language learners, and the way they learn within their social-communicative environment is considered key to this feat. In this lecture, we will go through the many ways infants are sensitive to multi-modal social cues soon after birth, how their social cognition develops over the first year of life, and how social interaction interfaces with language acquisition. I will introduce examples from my Tokyo lab's research along the way, where we use two approaches to understand the precise content, pathways, and mechanisms through which social aspects enhance learning. On the one hand, we use naturalistic recordings of infants' communicative environment to understand how infants extract information from their rich and complex social-communicative input? On the other hand, we use experimental techniques like virtual agents and gaze-contingent eye tracking to measure how social interaction shapes behavior, and information processing, and learning.

Zoom: https://sabanciuniv.zoom.us/j/99800558081?pwd=YmlCTFl4NEpIOTZFQ2lDT3VQRDRpZz09 

Meeting ID: 998 0055 8081, Passcode: 424524