Early semantic development: Linking language development to emerging participation in social events

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Katharina Rohlfing
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages ; General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology ; Developmental and Educational Psychology
• Term: from 2015 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 277161967

The main goal of this project is to contribute to the theory of early language development within the emerging embodied, distributed and situated approach to cognition. For decades, the field of language acquisition has been dominated by approaches, which searched for the learning mechanisms for language mainly in the individual mind of a child and focused mostly on word learning as mapping of labels to their referents. However within the emerging approach, in which language is seen as tightly integrated with other cognitive and social skills and inextricably immersed in action, there is a need to redefine language acquisition in terms of an extended set of mechanisms. Congruently with earlier, functionalist theories of language, a child thus learns the controlling power that utterances have in interactions with other people rather than simple correspondences to external objects.In this project, we propose a series of studies on early interactions between infants (2 to 12 months) and caregivers, aiming at: 1) extending our collaborative work to reveal the background structure of early interactions in which language is immersed; 2) showing the timing and place language assumes in these interactions; 3) demonstrating the difference that language makes in structuring interactions, especially in directing them towards external world; 4) analyzing how language progressively decouples from the ongoing physical activity (decontextualization). Research methods will consist in: A) theoretical analyses within existing frameworks for language development and for linking cognition to action (ecological psychology) and B) empirical methods, which rely on an innovative integration of qualitative microanalysis of existing videocorpora of early interactions, quantitative statistical and novel dynamical analyses of these data, as well as original experimental work. The project relies on integration of the expertise, infrastructure and resources of two major research centers, which evidence a high degree of compatibility and complementarity: the Faculty of Psychology, U. of Warsaw brings in expertise in ecological psychology and quantitative (traditional and dynamical) analyses and the CITEC, U. of Bielefeld specializes in early semantics, language development, qualitative and quantitative analysis of early interaction.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Poland
• Co-Investigator: Professorin Dr. Joanna Raczaszek-Leonardi