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SUMMARY:The earliest stages of second language acquisition and the adult c
 apacity for learning - Marianne Gullberg\, Max Planck Institute for Psycho
 linguistics in Nijmegen\, the Netherlands
DTSTART:20080304T160000Z
DTEND:20080304T173000Z
UID:TALK10356@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Napoleon Katsos
DESCRIPTION:How do adults break into the continuous speech stream of an un
 known language in the wild? Despite the work on the role of input in adult
  second language (L2) acquisition\, the advances of artificial language le
 arning studies\, etc.\, surprisingly little is known about this crucial fi
 rst step in adult L2 acquisition. The learning task minimally consists of 
 three components: (1) isolating a relevant string in continuous speech\, (
 2) identifying and mapping meaning onto it\, and (3) generalising from kno
 wn exemplars to novel items. This study examines what information adults c
 an extract from audio-visual input in an unknown and typologically distant
  L2 after minimal exposure and without help. We test whether Dutch adults 
 can recognise Mandarin Chinese words and extract lexical meaning after min
 imal exposure\, and what role item frequency and gestural links between so
 und and meaning play for such initial input processing. We also investigat
 e whether adults can generalise from encountered exemplars in the input to
  novel items after minimal exposure\, and extract phonotactic information.
  While emphasising the complexity of the learning task\, the results also 
 suggest that the adult learning mechanism is more powerful than normally a
 ssumed when faced with small amounts of complex\, continuous audio-visual 
 language input. 
LOCATION:GR-06/07\, English Faculty Building
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