EVENT: Psychological Colloquium: Evan Kidd: Domain-general learning processes and language acquisition

Presenter: Dr. Evan Kidd (ANU)

Dr. Evan Kidd was awarded his BBSc (Hons) in 1999 and PhD (Psycholinguistics) in 2004, both from La Trobe University. He worked at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany) as a postdoctoral research associate between 2003-2005, and as a Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Manchester (UK) between 2005-2012. From 2008- 2011 he was also a Charles La Trobe Research Fellow at La Trobe University. He has been at ANU since 2012.

Title: Domain-general learning processes and language acquisition

Eminent linguist Noam Chomsky once remarked: "It must be recognised that the notion of a 'probability of a sentence' is an entire useless one, under any interpretation of the term". Working from the assumption that language is a domain-specific innate skill (and arguing against behaviourist conceptualisations of learning), Chomsky rejected the notion that grammar could be learnable. In this talk I will argue that, contra the nativist argument, the acquisition of grammar involves a significant learning component in which the notion of probability is crucial. I will first review evidence that shows that children are intimately attuned to the frequency distributions of their ambient language. I will then present the results of two individual differences studies which show that a domain general capacity for statistical learning is significantly related to children's grammatical acquisition.