Conversational discourse plays an important role in children’s discovery of language and new words. Corpora of parent-child interactions have been instrumental in our understanding of how the linguistic information children are exposed to in early childhood may influence what and how they learn. In this talk, I’ll review some of the studies from our lab that build on this invaluable resource and show that while naturalistic spontaneous speech data provide a window into language development, experimental studies are often critical to clarify the developmental process and what children learn.
Dr Barbora Skarabela is a developmental linguist at the University of Edinburgh. She received her undergraduate degree in Czech and English Literature and Linguistics from Palacký University and her PhD from Boston University. Her main research interest is language development in typically developing infants and children. She uses experimental and corpus data to investigate the influence of linguistic and extra-linguistic features in parent-child interactions on lexical and morpho-syntactic acquisition and children’s understanding of discourse. She also works as Knowledge Exchange and Impact Officer with Lothian Birth Cohorts, a research group at the University of Edinburgh studying cognitive and brain ageing.
*** The talk will be delivered in person (MFF UK, Malostranské nám. 25, 4th floor, room S1) and will be streamed via Zoom. For details how to join the Zoom meeting, please write to sevcikova et ufal.mff.cuni.cz ***