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UID:20260602T201924EDT-2478xe2RrJ@132.216.98.100
DTSTAMP:20260603T001924Z
DESCRIPTION:The CRLMB welcomes Dr. Kim Plunkett\, who will present a\nDisti
 nguished Lecture entitled 'How infants build a semantic\nsystem: Lexical-s
 emantic priming in early lexical\ndevelopment.' Dr. Plunkett is a Professo
 r of Cognitive Neuroscience\nat Oxford University and Director of the Oxfo
 rd BabyLab\, a research\nfacility for the experimental investigation of li
 nguistic and\ncognitive development in babies and young children.\nAbstrac
 t:\n\nSeveral decades of research documents that infants as young as\n12-m
 onths-old understand the meaning of many dozens of words\ninsofar as they 
 are able identify an appropriate referent for a\nword when given a choice 
 between alternatives. The ability to\nidentify appropriate referents\, giv
 en a label\, develops rapidly\nduring the second year of life\, so that by
  the time an infant\nreaches her second birthday she may understand many h
 undreds of\nwords. Although we know a great deal about the types of words 
 that\ninfants understand and produce during their second year – so-called
 \nword-world relationships\, surprisingly\, we know virtually nothing\nabo
 ut their appreciation of the meaning relationships between words\nthemselv
 es. These meaning relations lie at the heart of the human\nsemantic system
 : Part of knowing what the word ‘dog’ means involves\nknowing\, if only im
 plicitly\, how it relates to the meaning of ‘cat’\nor ‘bone’. A proper und
 erstanding of semantic development involves\nidentification of how and whe
 n infants begin to link words together\nin a network of meanings\, thereby
  going beyond word-world\nassociations to achieve a system of meanings tha
 t underpins human\ncommunication.\n\nThe investigation of the structure of
  the mental lexicon in adults\nhas relied heavily on priming studies: Word
 s which prime each other\ndo so because they are linked together in the le
 xicon. We adopt a\nsimilar strategy for investigating the structure of the
  infant\nlexicon using an adaptation of the inter-modal preferential looki
 ng\ntask in which levels of lexical activation are indexed by visual\npref
 erence for a target over a distracter object under\nlinguistically primed 
 versus unprimed conditions. The results of\nour studies indicate that robu
 st semantic/associative priming is in\nplace by 21–24 months-old whereas 1
 8-month-olds fail to show clear\ncut sensitivity to priming. Additional co
 ntrol experiments have\nrevealed that the locus of these priming effects a
 re at the\nlexical-semantic level\, indicating that before infants reach t
 heir\nsecond birthday they have already started to form\nsemantic/associat
 ive links between words in a fashion that begins\nto resemble the structur
 e of the adult lexicon.\n
DTSTART:20091030T180000Z
DTEND:20091030T193000Z
LOCATION:Life Sciences Complex\, CA\, QC\, Montreal\, H3G 0B1\, 3649 promen
 ade Sir William Osler
SUMMARY:Dr.  Kim Plunkett: CRLMB Distinguished Lecture Series
URL:/channels/event/dr-kim-plunkett-crlmb-distinguishe
 d-lecture-series-109997
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