Children's information seeking during signed and spoken language processing
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- How do children comprehend and learn language despite noisy input and limits on their information processing capabilities? Social learning theories argue for the importance of acquiring language from more knowledgeable adults who can constrain the learning task. Statistical learning accounts emphasize the role of children's pattern detection abilities that can take advantage of the structure available in the input. Finally, active learning explanations focus on children's capacity to gather useful information to support their learning. This thesis presents an integrative explanation that brings together ideas from these theoretical accounts to investigate how children's information seeking adapts to learning within social contexts. I use the formalization of Optimal Experiment Design (OED) as a conceptual tool to bring together ideas from social and active learning. Then, I present a series of empirical studies motivated by the integrative account that ask how children's information seeking adapts during language processing across a diverse set of contexts: signed vs. spoken language (Chapters 2 and 3), (2) speech in clear vs. noisy environments (Chapter 3), and (3) novel words with or without an accompanied social cue to reference (Chapters 4 and 5). The upshot of the empirical work is that children are quite capable of flexibly seeking information from their communicative partners to support language processing.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2018; ©2018 |
| Publication date | 2018; 2018 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | MacDonald, Kyle (Kyle Earl) |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Frank, Michael C |
| Thesis advisor | Frank, Michael C |
| Thesis advisor | Gweon, Hyowon |
| Thesis advisor | Marchman, Virginia A |
| Thesis advisor | McClelland, James L |
| Degree committee member | Gweon, Hyowon |
| Degree committee member | Marchman, Virginia A |
| Degree committee member | McClelland, James L |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Psychology. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Kyle MacDonald. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Psychology. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2018. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2018 by Kyle Earl MacDonald
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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