PostDoctoral Research Fellowship

Suanda Sumarga H, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

How children learn words is of interest to scholars in the cognitive, developmental, and learning sciences, as well as to clinicians and educators. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in viewing word learning, and language acquisition more generally, as a process of abstracting structure from probabilistic information in the learning environment. In the context of word learning, support for this view comes from three types of findings: (1) computational work suggesting that rich latent structures are discoverable from the child's seemingly "noisy" input; (2) observational findings highlighting correlations between distributional features of the environment (e.g., the frequency of a word) and acquisition (e.g., the age at which that word is learned); and (3) controlled laboratory studies revealing that human learners have a remarkable capacity to pick up on the co-occurrence regularities between words and their referents. Intellectual Merit. The applicant is conducting research that expands current understanding of this learning process by examining whether the prowess of human statistical language learning, well documented in artificial laboratory tasks, scales up to real-world learning contexts. Employing a multi-methodological approach (i.e., high-density multimodal observations from the perspective of the child learner, behavioral experiments with both children and adult learners, computational modeling), the applicant is (1) estimating the real-world word-to-referent co-occurrence structure to which children are exposed; (2) examining whether words can be learned from this co-occurrence information alone; and (3) investigating the mechanisms that may underlie such learning. In addition to advancing our state of knowledge in the cognitive and developmental sciences, this work has the potential to inform neighboring areas of inquiry such as individual differences in language development, vocabulary development through reading and second language acquisition. Broader Impacts. The planned project has three broader impacts. First, the project includes enhanced training opportunities for undergraduate student researchers, including students from under-represented backgrounds. This vertical integration exposes students to multiple methodologies across diverse disciplines (e.g., psychology, linguistics, computer science), and thus serves as an excellent training opportunity for these students' own future careers in science. Second, the project yields novel pieces of data (e.g., recordings of real-world interactions from the child's perspective, detailed transcripts of children's language learning environment, experimental stimuli, computer simulation code) that is being shared with the larger scientific community. Finally, as a study of children's learning abilities and their language environments, the study encourages participation in scientific endeavors by members of the local community. Outreach Plan for Broadening Participation. The proposal also includes an outreach plan to broaden the participation of under-represented minorities in science. The applicant is carrying out the research at Indiana University, which has a solid infrastructure in place for outreach efforts. During this fellowship, the applicant is partnering with these established programs and is engaging in the following: (1) visiting a nearby university with a large population of under-represented students to conduct information sessions about summer research opportunities, graduate school applications, and career opportunities in psychology; (2) offering one-on-one mentoring to students from under-represented backgrounds who are applying to graduate school in STEM fields; (3) enrolling in training opportunities for becoming a better mentor to under-represented students. Additionally, as a scholar with Indonesian heritage, the applicant is a minority in the field of psychological science.