UROP Project
Statistical word learning in bilinguals
Contact
Key Info
Basic Information
- Project Offer-Number:
- 1159
- Category:
- UROP International
- Field:
- Psychology
- Faculty:
- 0
- Organisation unit:
- Institute of Psychology
- Language Skills:
- English
MoveOn
In the past ten years, statistical word learning as a mechanism of vocabulary acquisition in monolinguals has received a lot of attention. Here, the idea is that people can acquire novel words in the absence of explicit instruction by combining co-occurrence information of words and objects across situations (e.g., Yu & Smith, 2007), where a word and its meaning have a higher than chance probability of being present at the same time. For example, the word APPLE will be more likely to co-occur with the object APPLE than another randomly selected word (e.g., FOOTBALL). As a result, the association between the word APPLE and the object APPLE are strengthened as exposure increases, whereas incorrect mappings are not. At this point, there is plenty of data that people, including infants, can acquire word-object-mappings via statistical word learning. In this project, we will investigate how statistical word learning may differ in bilinguals from statistical word learning in monolinguals.
Task
The intern's tasks include the planning of the study (including stimulus development), data collection, data analysis, and report.
Requirements
Being enrolled in a B.Sc. Psychology program; interest in language acquisition and bilingualism