Katja Stärk defends thesis on 8 April

Link to live-stream



How do infants learn language? It may look easy because they seem to learn their mother tongue without difficulties, but there are challenges. For instance, the language input infants receive does not contain any obvious cues to indicate word boundaries, but children still manage to build a broad vocabulary before they start school. In this thesis, I investigated three important questions about human language development: (1) Which linguistic cues can infants use to learn their first words? (2) Do we use patterns from our mother tongue, which we acquired as infants, to learn another language as we get older? and (3) Do we exploit various linguistic cues to help us learn and understand new languages?