Doctoral Dissertation Prize
Ruthe Foushee
“Self-directed learning in language development: Interactions of linguistic complexity, learner attention, and language socialization”
University of California, Berkeley
Abstract: While we celebrate children as curious and resourceful learners, when we consider their development of language, we tend to study them as passive recipients of adult guidance. I show how instead adopting a view of the child as an active language learner can help resolve gaps in our understanding of what makes different language sources “effective” for learning, including by addressing a paradox in the literature: although even toddlers learn new words from overheard speech in laboratory studies, there is surprisingly little evidence that children learn from naturally-occurring overheard language. Drawing on evidence that infants disattend to stimuli that are overly complex, I propose that young rational learners in environments where child-directed speech is common may initially learn little from overheard speech because it is too complex to maintain their attention. A combination of results from methods across developmental science, natural language processing, psycholinguistics, and anthropology suggest that this proposal holds promise.
