Workshop: Semantic Development (Cognitive Science Society, 2010)

[David Barner]

Dear colleagues,

I'd like to invite you to attend a special workshop on semantic development
at CogSci 2010, described below.

We look forward to seeing you in Portland on August 11!

Dave

--
David Barner, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology
University of California, San Diego
5336 McGill Hall, 9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, CA 92093-0109
t: 858-246-0874
f: 858-534-7190
http://www.ladlab.com

--------------------------------------------------

WORKSHOP: Semantic Development: An Interdisciplinary Approach
Cognitive Science 2010, Portland Oregon, August 11, 2010
Organizers: David Barner & Susan Carey

Featuring contributions from: Susan Carey, David Barner, Lance Rips, Luca
Bonatti, Lisa Feigenson, Justin Halberda, Fei Xu, Noah Goodman, Ira Noveck,
Sarah-Jane Leslie, Jesse Snedeker, Sandeep Prasada, & Anna Papafragou

 Most research on language development has concentrated on how children
acquire lexical representations, syntax, and phonology. In contrast,here has
been relatively little work on the acquisition of the formal semantic
component of language. Historically, work on logical development has been
mainly concerned with the argument schemas that underlie deductive argument.
But recently there has been an explosion of research on the logical
capacities that underlie the semantics of natural language and that underlie
mathematical cognition. The proposed full-day workshop will explore current
investigations of Semantic Development, with a focus on how recent work in
psychology and numerical cognition is related to formal semantic models of
linguistic competence. Recent empirical work has documented rich
non-linguistic quantitative capacities in human adults, pre-linguistic
infants, and various non-human animals. These systems support the
representation and tracking of objects, the chunking of object arrays into
sets, and the discrimination of relative numerosities. Studies have also
established that these systems of representation become associated with
linguistic quantity representations in development. For example, number
words are associated with approximate number representations in human
adults. Similarly, infants’ ability to track small sets of objects appears
to support (and constrain) their ability to learn words like 'two.'
Quantifiers like 'more' and 'most' also draw on these non-linguistic systems
for the purposes of meaning verification. However, attested non-linguistic
systems are unable to represent many critical formal aspects of language and
of mathematical competence. This suggests that formal representations may
not originate solely from non-linguistic sources. But if this is true, what
is their origin, and how do they become related to non-linguistic
representations? Do non-linguistic systems supply content that is
constitutive of later semantic competence, or do they act as systems of
meaning verification, which do not supply content, but allow semantic
learning hypotheses to be tested in the world? These questions will form the
core of the proposed workshop.

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Info-CHILDES" group.
To post to this group, send email to info-childes at googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to info-childes+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/info-childes?hl=en.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/info-childes/attachments/20100520/052acadc/attachment.htm>