Past events: Casey Lew-Williams. Infants’ learning from the dynamics of their natural communicative environments

What: Infants’ learning from the dynamics of their natural communicative environments.

Where: BCBL Zoom Room # 2 (online talk) (If you would like to attend to this meeting reserve at info@bcbl.eu)

Who: Professor Casey Lew-Williams, PhD, Department of Psychology, Princeton University, NJ, US

When:  Thursday, Jan 25th at 14:30 h.

The best future for developmental and language sciences will be one that embraces both descriptive research and great experiments. We can all look forward to the new hypotheses that emerge from this union, which will position us to create novel models of learning, growth, and change. In my talk, I will present a combination of controlled experiments and entirely natural studies of communication between infants and caregivers, which together show the benefits of sampling at short timescales (milliseconds to minutes) as well as longer ones (hours to years). In doing so, I question the tendency to isolate diverse topics in developmental science, such as language, emotion, the social brain, and cultural variation. Complete accounts of communication and learning not only need to examine how these relate to each other, but grapple with how they permeate each other. My hope is that this research can get us closer to seeing the development of communication as it really is: a dynamic, messy, continuous, embodied, and highly variable process, scaffolded by the local social world.