Lost in Translation (BSL Interpreted Event)

In the 2016 movie Arrival, a linguist attempts to communicate with a heptapod alien. They gradually figure out that the aliens also wanted to communicate and end up having something of a conversation. No need to call upon aliens, this process happens every day as parents and their newborn babies attempt to establish communication. I will take the audience through some basic principles of how we figure out someone wants to talk to us - exemplified with a plethora of cute videos of babbling babies. We will discuss how communication changes when certain modalities are not available, as when babies or the parents are Deaf and about the additional challenges faced when infants cannot access the main mode of communication used by their caregivers, as when deaf babies are born to hearing families. We will wonder at humans' amazing abilities to establish communication whatever the challenges and discuss the evolutionary origins of these abilities.

As adults, we have vast knowledge of how the things (objects/animals) that we encounter are similar to/different from each other. This influences both how we talk about them, giving them all the same name (i.e., 'dog') and how we interact with them (e.g., throwing a ball for a dog to fetch but not typically doing the same for a cat). How do we learn this? What do babies know about these different categories? My talk details a new study exploring how 10- to 20-month-olds begin to learn such categories and investigating how this relates to their everyday experiences and language knowledge.