The next talk in the Cognitive Development Center seminar series at the CEU will be given by Sudha Arunachalam (Psychology, Northwestern University) What's in a Sentence? Linguistic Cues to Word Meaning Tuesday, December 15, 5.00pm PLease note that this seminar will be on TUESDAY and not Wednesday. ABSTRACT Decades of research have shown that young learners, upon encountering a new word for the very first time, assign it at least a rudimentary meaning. But what information do they require to do so, and what do these meanings look like? I will discuss experimental work with 2-year-olds which employs novel word learning tasks to address these questions. I will focus specifically on toddlers' use of the sentential contexts in which a new word appears to guess its meaning. I will argue that toddlers are adept at using linguistic contexts to infer aspects of word meaning, and further, that these rudimentary meanings are abstract and allow the child to generalize appropriately beyond the situation in which the verb was first encountered. CEU Cognitive Development Center Hattyuhaz, Level 3, Hattyu u. 14., 1015 Budapest Map: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=1015+Budapest,+Budapest,+Hattyu+utca+14,+Hung… Everyone is welcome to attend. Our seminars start on time and we may not be able to let latecomers in.