Date: Tuesday, July 12, 2022
Chair: Ágnes Kovács
Title: Prediction
as a mechanism supporting language learning
Abstract: Young
children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning (syntactic bootstrapping). I propose that syntactic bootstrapping relates to a larger cognitive model: predictive processing. According to this model, we perceive
and make sense of the world by constantly predicting what will happen next in a probabilistic fashion. I will outline evidence that prediction operates within language acquisition and show how this framework helps us understand the way lexical knowledge refines
syntactic predictions, and how syntactic knowledge refines predictions about novel words’ meanings. I end by discussing some challenges of applying the predictive processing framework to syntactic bootstrapping and propose new avenues to investigate in future
work.