BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//talks.cam.ac.uk//v3//EN
BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
TZID:Europe/London
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
TZOFFSETFROM:+0000
TZOFFSETTO:+0100
TZNAME:BST
DTSTART:19700329T010000
RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=3;BYDAY=-1SU
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:+0100
TZOFFSETTO:+0000
TZNAME:GMT
DTSTART:19701025T020000
RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=10;BYDAY=-1SU
END:STANDARD
END:VTIMEZONE
BEGIN:VEVENT
CATEGORIES:RCEAL Tuesday Colloquia
SUMMARY:The earliest stages of second language acquisition
  and the adult capacity for learning - Marianne Gu
 llberg\, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistic
 s in Nijmegen\, the Netherlands
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20080304T160000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20080304T173000
UID:TALK10356AThttp://talks.cam.ac.uk
URL:http://talks.cam.ac.uk/talk/index/10356
DESCRIPTION:How do adults break into the continuous speech str
 eam of an unknown language in the wild? Despite th
 e work on the role of input in adult second langua
 ge (L2) acquisition\, the advances of artificial l
 anguage learning studies\, etc.\, surprisingly lit
 tle is known about this crucial first step in adul
 t L2 acquisition. The learning task minimally cons
 ists of three components: (1) isolating a relevant
  string in continuous speech\, (2) identifying and
  mapping meaning onto it\, and (3) generalising fr
 om known exemplars to novel items. This study exam
 ines what information adults can extract from audi
 o-visual input in an unknown and typologically dis
 tant L2 after minimal exposure and without help. W
 e test whether Dutch adults can recognise Mandarin
  Chinese words and extract lexical meaning after m
 inimal exposure\, and what role item frequency and
  gestural links between sound and meaning play for
  such initial input processing. We also investigat
 e whether adults can generalise from encountered e
 xemplars in the input to novel items after minimal
  exposure\, and extract phonotactic information. W
 hile emphasising the complexity of the learning ta
 sk\, the results also suggest that the adult learn
 ing mechanism is more powerful than normally assum
 ed when faced with small amounts of complex\, cont
 inuous audio-visual language input. 
LOCATION:GR-06/07\, English Faculty Building
CONTACT:Napoleon Katsos
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR