The social and cognitive foundations of language acquisition
In this talk Dr Paul Ibbotson will discuss his experimental, corpus and modelling work exploring the social and cognitive foundations of language acquisition. In an approach that can be described as developmental cognitive linguistics he aims to show (a) how cognitive bottlenecks can place adaptive constraints on learning and (b) the value-added of integrating social and cognitive development into our models of language development. Examples are drawn from such non-linguistic domains as inhibition, memory, attention, and categorisation to illustrative how their development can shape the course of language acquisition.
