Tufts University Cognitive Science Program Lecture Detail

Home	About	Publications	Positions	Lectures	Related


Fast, smart and out of control Presented by Jesse Snedeker Fri 11/20/2009 ~ 4:00:00 PM ~ Conference Room Psych Building
In the past ten years there has been an explosion of research on children's real time language comprehension. Young children, like adults, interpret language in a cascaded fashion, with processes at higher levels of linguistic analysis beginning before processes at lower levels are complete. Children's structural processing is smart is two ways. First, preschoolers use multiple sources of information to constrain parsing and converge on the most probable analysis of an unfolding utterance. Second, during comprehension, children employ abstract mappings between syntax and semantics that are of roughly the same scope as those used by adults. These mappings can be primed allowing us to explore both their scope and how they develop over time. Preschoolers and adults are different in some respects: children make poorer use of context, are slower to inhibit competing alternatives, and have difficulty revising their interpretation in light of conflicting evidence. One is tempted to conclude that changes in language processing during the school years largely reflect the development of control processes. Our preliminary work on language processing in children with Aspergers syndrome provides further support for such an account.