Dr. Elissa Newport
Young children are much better than adults at learning new languages. Surprisingly, they also differ from adults in not always acquiring precisely the language to which they are exposed; under some circumstances they change the language as they learn it. In this talk Dr. Newport will present her studies of young, emerging sign languages around the world and her studies of children learning miniature languages in a laboratory setting. In both settings she has shown that, when exposed to languages that are newly formed and therefore inconsistently used, children will make the structure more regular and add new constructions and rules. Taken together, these studies demonstrate that children are a prime force in developing and expanding languages as they are formed.
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