Understanding Children’s Language Learning: A “Bigger Data” Approach
A Lecture by Professor Michael Frank
What influences a child’s first words? Why do first words vary so much when children first speak? Professor Michael Frank explores how large datasets are revealing the importance of children’s social environment and suggesting new commonalities in language learn-ing across very different languages.
Michael C. Frank, Ph.D., is the David and Lucile Packard Professor of Human Biology in the Department of Psychology. He earned his B.A. and B.S. from Stanford in 2004, and his Ph.D. from MIT in 2010. His research lies at the intersection of social cognition and language, asking “How do children figure out how language works and how do they grasp the rudiments of language from an early age?” Frank seeks to understand how the social context of interac-tions between children and caregivers both facilitates establishing a link between word and meaning, and helps children learn how these words go together in sentences. Since the language exposure children get early on in life is critical to their later language profi-ciency and school performance, this work can help in the design of interventions to improve children’s language outcomes.
Professor Frank is the organizer of the ManyBabies Consortium, a collaborative replication network for infancy research, and has led open-data projects including Wordbank and MetaLab. He has been recognized by the Association for Psychological Science as a rising star. His dissertation received the Glushko Prize from the Cognitive Science Society, and he is a recipient of the FABBS Early Career Impact award and a Jacobs Foundation Advanced Research Fellowship. He has served as Associate Editor for the journal Cognition, chair of the Governing Board of the Cognitive Science Society, and was a founding member of the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science.
Professor Frank’s book Variability and Consistency in Early Language Learning: The Wordbank Project will be published by MIT Press.