Dear all,

The CEU Department of Cognitive Science invites you to the following talk:

Inbal Arnon (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

Starting Big: the importance of whole-to-part learning in language learning

Why are children better language learners than adults despite being worse at a range of other cognitive tasks? Understanding this can shed new light on the process of first language learning and how it differs from that of second language learning, while also providing us with additional tools for teaching second languages effectively. Many accounts focus on the cognitive or neurological differences between children and adults, which are in many ways irreversible. In my work, I focus instead on the way prior knowledge impacts the linguistic building blocks that children and adults use during learning, and how those early building blocks impact learning outcomes. I will present evidence for the Starting Big Approach: the idea that children's advantage is related to their greater engagement with whole-to-part learning. Specifically, I propose that children rely on both single words and multiword units during learning, while adults do so less (because of their prior knowledge of words), and that this difference can explain (some of) adults' difficulty in learning the relations between words. I draw on developmental, psycholinguistic and computational findings to show that multiword units are integral building blocks in language; that such units are facilitative for learning certain grammatical relations; and that adult learners rely on them less than children, a pattern that can explain differences between L1 and L2 learning. I will end by discussing implications for models of L1 and L2 learning and the possible role of whole-to-part learning in the emergence of linguistic structure.

Date: Wednesday, September 17, 2025

Time: 4 pm (to 5:30 pm) CET

Venue: D002-Tiered* (QS Vienna) and Zoom (meeting ID: 969 2496 5784, passcode: 471712)

Chair: Gergely Csibra

*Anyone not affiliated with CEU wishing to attend in-person in Vienna must RSVP MailScanner has detected definite fraud in the website at "forms.cloud.microsoft". Do not trust this website: here to get access to the lecture hall.

If you want to schedule a meeting with Inbal, please indicate your availability here.

Best,

Mariem