Prof Jane Childers, Trinity University

Abstract: Learning verbs is difficult and critical to learning one's native language. Children appear to benefit from seeing multiple events and comparing them to each other, and structural alignment theory provides a good theoretical framework to guide research into how preschool children may be comparing events as they learn new verbs. The talk will include 6 studies of early verb learning that make use of eye-tracking procedures as well as other behavioral (pointing) procedures, and that test key predictions from SA theory including the prediction that seeing similar examples before more varied examples helps observers learn how to compare (progressive alignment) and the prediction that when events have very low alignability with other events, that is one cue that the events should be ignored. Whether or how statistical learning may also be at work will be considered.

Bio: Dr. Jane Childers is a Professor and Chair of the Psychology Department at Trinity University (San Antonio), where she has worked for the past 23 years. After graduate mentorship by Dr. Cathy Echols (UT Austin) and a post-doc with Michael Tomasello (Emory; Max Planck I., Leipzig), she began studying how children learn verbs using comparing in the early 2000s- some of these including samples in Korea, Singapore and Japan. She has published multiple peer-reviewed research articles, mostly with her undergraduate students, and has been awarded two R15 (AREA) NIH grants. She is an Associate Editor at the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.