[Seminar] "Intention sharing based on shared goals and word learning: Social-Pragmatic Perspective to language development"

Prof. Harumi Kobayashi, Tokyo Denki University

Title:
"Intention sharing based on shared goals and word learning: Social-Pragmatic Perspective to language development"

Abstract:
Exploring children’s language development provides us a precious opportunity to examine mechanisms of emerging human communication. Among various aspects of language, how children learn word meanings at all is one most basic and important aspect.  Previous studies on word learning tended to focus on innate principles such as word learning biases, or perceptual aspects of objects and association of these to sounds.  However, other peoples’ actions may play an important role because such human actions suggest certain purposes or goals that those objects attain in human life.  Intention sharing based on shared goals plays an important role. I discuss how intention sharing and goal-directed actions contribute to learning word meanings from Social-Pragmatic Perspective to language development.