Event Details

This event is co-organised by the Multilingualism&Cognition Research Group, the Heritage Language 2 Consortium (HL2C) and UiT’s C/LaBL Brain Domain. We are delighted to welcome Prof. Caroline Rowland (the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics)as our invited speaker in our joint seminar series.

Title: How to build a human chatbot

Abstract

Human children learn language faster than even the most powerful large language models, requiring significantly less input to acquire the phonemes, words and grammar of their language. In this talk, I introduce a framework of the language acquisition process in children that explains how they might do this. This framework conceptualises learning as a process of structure-building; linguistic representations are constructed via a process that assimilates information from multimodal communicative interactions into existing knowledge, and modifies existing knowledge in response to new input, with information circulating through the system in a feedforward-feedback loop. I then present three empirical studies that show how children and adults together create ideal learning moments for language in this way. I argue, in particular, that the way in which children experience language in multimodal interactions helps explain why they are, by far, the most efficient language learners on the planet.

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We look forward to seeing you at the seminar!