报告人：Michael C. Frank (斯坦福大学心理学系)

报告题目: Bigger data about smaller people: Studying children’s language learning at scale

摘要: How do children acquire a language? Decades of work have provided a roadmap of principles and mechanisms for early language learning as attested by small-scale laboratory tasks. But there is not yet a convincing empirical synthesis of this work that addresses both the systematicity and ubiquity of language learning and the variability of learning trajectories across children. In this talk I will describe some initial steps towards such a synthesis. This research integrates high-density data from individual children learning a single language and summary data from tens of thousands of children learning more than a dozen languages. Taken together, the data support a hybrid picture in which children slowly accumulate knowledge in rich social contexts but also show evidence for surprisingly fast grammatical abstractions. 

时间：2018年9月18日（周二）下午14:00 -16:00

地点：清华大学文南楼116

报告人简介: Michael C. Frank is Associate Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. He earned his BS from Stanford University in Symbolic Systems in 2005 and his PhD from MIT in Brain and Cognitive Sciences in 2010. He studies both adults' language use and children's language learning and how both of these interact with social cognition. His work uses behavioral experiments, computational tools, and novel measurement methods including large-scale web-based studies, eye-tracking, and head-mounted cameras. He has been recognized as a "rising star" by the Association for Psychological Science. His dissertation received the Glushko Prize from the Cognitive Science Society, and he is recipient of the FABBS Early Career Impact award and the Klaus W. Jacobs Advanced Research Fellowship. He has served as Associate Editor for the journal Cognition, member and chair of the Governing Board of the Cognitive Science Society, and was a founding Executive Committee member of the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science.