Event Date: Friday, 21 April, 2017, 11 a.m.
Location: Piazza Torricelli, 2, Pisa, PI, Italia [Aula Magna, Palazzo Matteucci]
Speaker: Prof. Raquel Fernández (ILLC, Amsterdam)
Title: Acquiring Language through Interaction
Abstract: As any other type of joint action, conversation requires coordination in real time. In this talk, I will present a couple of studies that make use of corpus-based methods to investigate the patterns that shape coordination in conversations with children in the process of acquiring language. The results show that child-directed speech is locally fine-tuned to and contingent on the child’s linguistic behaviour during the course of interaction and that the presence of implicit corrections contributes to language learning.
Raquel Fernández is Associate Professor at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) of the University of Amsterdam, where she leads the Dialogue Modelling Group. She obtained her PhD in computational linguistics from King’s College London in 2006 and worked at Potsdam and Stanford as a postdoctoral researcher before joining the ILLC.