Francisco Lacerda on the ecology of language acquisition

 

 

"I think it's because we owe more to the natural sciences than other departments," says Professor Francisco Lacerda, head of the Section. "We're very interested in examining the relationship between language and the actual environment so we tend to take a more ecological approach. We look at how the immediate environment influences what infants learn."

Spend ten minutes wandering around the department's impressive facilities and you'll soon discover that this isn't quite like any other university linguistics laboratories.

"We've got a fantastically equipped lab thanks to a Wallenberg grant," enthuses Professor Lacerda, clearly proud of the many rooms stocked with computers and digital equipment to record just every bodily response to sound.

"In addition to high-quality audio and video recordings, we can track eye-movement and brain activity in subjects of all ages, articulatory movement of the mouth, lips and tongue as well as muscle activity," says Lacerda.  "We're also able to  study how visual and auditory information is integrated into different speech communication situations. Visiting Erasmus students tend to be amazed at the kind of work we're doing here."

The work that's being done by by Stockholm's linguists has been recognized as one of the University's fifteen leading research areas. Lacerda's projects, in particular, are particularly innovative as he and his team of researchers have forced scholars to rethink how infants learn language. 

Whereas previous scholars claimed there is an innate human propensity for speech, Lacerda's Ecological Theory of Language Acquisition (ELTA) posits that a newborn's move towards speech is a consequence of a general recognition process. As such, the initial stages of language acquisition are seen as unintended albeit an inevitable consequence of the the infant's multi-sensory interaction with the adult.

"Traditionally, linguists argued that we learn to speak by learning sounds and combining them to form words," explains Lacerda. "Our research however, based on data collected from studying young infants around the age of 8 months, shows that parents influence what children learn to say.   The newborn infant is endowed with the ability to register a wide range of multi-sensory inputs and an ability to detect similarity between the multi-sensory stimuli it is exposed to. The language input that occurs as a parent speaks to a child helps the infant identify the building blocks of language. Parents and the environment have a more significant influence on the way young infants learn to speak than was first thought."

The implications of ELTA, revealing that there is enough multi-sensory information in typical contexts of early language acquisition that allow the infant to derive lexical items using a pattern of recognition processes, has been taken up by the MILLE (Modelling Interactive Language Learning) project group - an international multidisciplinary project supported by the The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation and involving the Department of Linguistics, the Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University (USA) and TMH at Stockholm's Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm.

"In June next year we'll be holding an international conference on Emergent Models of Early Language Learning," says Professor Lacerda. "It will be an exciting close to this stage of our work."

Understandably, Lacerda is keen for work to continue. 

"Five years ago it was very radical to talk of the ecology of language acquisition. Now, we are on the map and people are starting to take note. I hope we can push our research further and explore more of the masses of data we have accumulated."

Further information

To find out more about the Emergent Models of Early Language Learning Conference as well as study and research opportunities at the Phonetics Section, visit www2.ling.su.se/eng/.

Text and interview: Jon Buscall