Invited Speaker

Talk Schedule

April 17th (Thu), 15:00-16:00

Profile

Sho Tsuji a Principal Investigator at the IRCN Babylab, the University of Tokyo and Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, CNRS. Her research investigates the mechanisms behind young children’s amazing capacity to acquire language fast and efficiently in diverse environments. Drawing on observational, experimental, and interventional methods, she focuses on the role of the linguistic environment and social context, especially the role of the interactive nature of social situations, for advancing learning. Observational study of infants’ socio-communicative environment provides a detailed account of the cues available to infants; lab experiments probe infants’ sensitivity to such cues; and intervention studies assess the causal effect and practical impact of enriching teaching contexts with such cues.
Website

Title

SCALa: Bridging social learning and computational models in language acquisition

Abstract

Language is a uniquely human system of communication, acquired by infants with remarkable speed and efficiency across diverse linguistic and cultural settings. Social interaction plays a pivotal role in this process, shaping infants' experiences from birth and influencing cognition from attention to higher-level learning. Recent advances in wearable devices have revolutionized our ability to measure infants' daily auditory environments, providing unprecedented insights into language input variability. However, extracting relevant content from such large-scale data is not a trivial problem. I introduce SCALa (Socio-Computational Architecture of Language Acquisition), a computational framework that links social and environmental information with mechanisms for extracting and learning language-relevant cues. SCALa offers an integrative perspective on language acquisition and informs future large-scale empirical research.



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