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SUMMARY:Building abstractions in Language Development - Professor E Lieven
  (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology\, Leipzig/School of P
 sychological Sciences\, University of Manchester)
DTSTART:20130530T150000Z
DTEND:20130530T163000Z
UID:TALK45226@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Madeleine Forbes
DESCRIPTION:Most accounts of child language acquisition use as analytic to
 ols adult-like syntactic categories and grammars with little concern for w
 hether they are psychologically real for young children.  However when app
 roached from a cognitive and functional theoretical perspective\, recent r
 esearch has demonstrated that children do not operate initially with such 
 abstract linguistic entities\, despite aspects of their language being hig
 hly productive from early on.  Instead they construct more abstract lingui
 stic representations only gradually - on the basis of linguistic experienc
 e in which the consistency of markers\, the complexity of the construction
  in question and relative type and token frequencies within and across con
 structions play a key role.  In this talk I will address these issues usin
 g research that employs naturalistic\, experimental and modelling methodol
 ogies and that is applied to a range of languages and to the errors that c
 hildren make.
LOCATION:Room GR06/07\, Faculty of English\, Sidgwick Site\, West Road\, C
 ambridge
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