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Kim Plunkett 'On learning linguistic categories' Many bilinguals will be sympathetic to the view that the language you speak affects the way you think. If this view is correct, then one might expect linguistic input to have a dramatic impact upon conceptual development in infancy. I will describe a series of experiments that provides support for the view that labels impact the process of categorization in young infants even before they begin to produce their first words, to the extent that labels can override the perceptual dissimilarities between objects and lead infants to treat them as more similar to each other. The experiments also demonstrate that young infants can simultaneously compute the correlational structure of object features in the visual domain at the same time as they compute the relationship of that correlational structure to novel features (words) in the auditory domain. This cross-modal, computational capacity is a powerful tool for the young infant to exploit in deriving the meaning of words. A second series of studies investigates the development of the
semantic system during the second year of life. Hitherto, investigations
of word meaning in early lexical development have been restricted
to explorations of the associative/reference relations between labels
and events. Research has neglected the infant’s representation
of the semantic or associative relationships between the words themselves
which lies at the heart of adult semantic networks. I will present
a new technique for measuring linguistic priming effects in infants
and show how we can begin to trace the emergence of semantic networks
even during the earliest stages of lexical development. Bio Kim Plunkett obtained a bachelor's degree in Physics at Imperial College before switching to Experimental Psychology at Sussex University where he obtained his D.Phil. in 1979. After brief sojourns at Nottingham University and the Open University, he moved to the Institute of Psychology, Aarhus University, Denmark where he investigated children's acquisition of Scandinavian languages. In 1986, he moved to the University of California, San Diego to study the application of neural networks to modelling linguistic and cognitive development in young children. Since 1991, he has been a member of the faculty in the Department of Experimental Psychology, Oxford University and is a fellow of St. Hugh's College, Oxford. In 1993, he established the Oxford BabyLab which is a research facility for the experimental investigation of linguistic and cognitive development in babies and young children. He maintains an active interest in Scandinavian languages and neural network modelling. Kim Plunkett is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Oxford University.
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Prof.
Kim Plunkett, |
