29 November 2017

Speaker: Holly Branigan (University of Edinburgh)

Title: Learning as we talk: Syntactic priming effects as evidence for syntactic representation and processing in children’s language development

Venue and Time: room 3.58 (John Percival Building), 12.10

Abstract:

How do children learn syntactic structure? And what role might language experience play in this process? It is uncontroversial that young children’s experiences of language are based in dialogue and interaction (e.g., Tomasello, 2003), and there is considerable evidence that characteristics of these experiences have a strong influence on children’s language use and language development. In this talk, I consider how evidence from syntactic priming effects is informative about both the nature of children’s syntactic representations, and the way in which they learn syntactic structure, in both typical and atypical development.

I will propose that syntactic priming provides a method that has many advantages for studying children’s syntactic representations (Branigan & Pickering, in press), and show how it can address fundamental questions about the extent to which these representations are abstract and independent of semantic or lexical content. I will then discuss how evidence from syntactic priming experiments can cast light on the way in which individual syntactic experiences influence children’s immediate language use and long-term language development. Drawing on evidence from a series of recent studies, I will show that children not only show an immediate and dynamic sensitivity to a conversational partner’s use of syntax, but also show longer term influences within and across dialogues that are consistent with implicit learning of syntactic structure.

Holly Branigan is Professor of Psychology of Language and Cognition at the University of Edinburgh. After a degree in Language and Linguistic Science at the University of York, and an MSc /PhD in Cognitive Science at the University of Edinburgh, she held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Glasgow before joining the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences at Edinburgh. Her research is mainly concerned with the nature of the cognitive processes and representations that underlie language production and interactive language use, with a particular focus on syntactic structure. Her work addresses these issues in a wide range of populations, including monolingual and bilingual adults, typically developing children, children with an autistic spectrum condition, and children with specific language impairment.