OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Studies with adult participants and artificial languages in our lab suggest that two distributional characteristics of the Input Sample help the learner to master the highly complex structures of language: 1) Initial intensive training with simple constructions and 2) Semantic Biases. We studied these effects by manipulating distributional characteristics of small training samples of an artificial miniature language. I will argue that the effects found in the lab represent crucial aspects of natural language acquisition. Language is learned along with knowledge of the world, through the interaction with caregivers who tune their speech to the level of development of the learner. In that sense, these lab studies might help us understanding how young associative learners eventually grasp the non-linear patterns of language.
