About this session

Thursday, 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM

Investigating the role of active learning across language development

How do individuals make decisions about what to learn or how to learn about it? Recent work demonstrates that learner’s “goal-directed search for information” has profound effects on learning (Saylor & Ganea, 2018). For example, children seek out information about unfamiliar objects to reduce ambiguity (Bazhydai et al., 2020; Zettersten & Saffran, 2021), and seek out information they want to attend to (Foushee et al., 2021). This active information-seeking helps learners map labels to objects and learn new categories (e.g. Partridge et al., 2015; Kachergis et al., 2013; Ackermann et al., 2020). How does active learning extend to other aspects of language development? This symposium explores how information-seeking can affect learning across a range of contexts, spanning different linguistic domains, developmental stages, and learning challenges.

Talk 1 uses a gaze contingent paradigm with 20-23-month-olds, testing the role of curiosity in learning novel words. Talk 2 takes an active learning approach to talker variability, asking whether preschoolers and adults seek out talker variability during novel word learning. Talk 3 focuses on book reading, testing whether 3-9-year-olds choose books that are the “just right” level of complexity, and how this complexity impacts learning. Talk 4 probes active sampling for category learning in 5-8 year olds. Across talks, we highlight the types of information learners attend to during novel learning tasks, and test effects of this information-seeking on learning. Together, these talks will allow us to zoom out, and consider when and to what extent active learning influences language learning at multiple levels across development.

Paper #1
Title	Does curiosity predict learning in infants?
Presenting author	Dr. Marina Bazhydai, Ph.D., Lancaster University, United Kingsom

Paper #2
Title	Preschoolers and adults seek out talker variability during word learning
Presenting author	Federica Bulgarelli, Ph.D., University At Buffalo, United States

Paper #3
Title	Goldilocks and the Three Books
Presenting author	Ruthe Foushee, Ph.D., New School for Social Research, United States

Paper #4
Title	How children seek information to learn the extension of novel words
Presenting author	Jamie Chen, Princeton University, United States

View all paper details

Session chair
Federica Bulgarelli, University at Buffalo, United States

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