LLED welcomes all to our upcoming Research Seminar.

Date: Thursday, April 30, 2015.
Time: 12:30 – 1:30 pm
Location: Digital Literacy Centre, Ponderosa Annex F

Investigating the potential role of picture books in tense and aspect learning for children learning English
Dr. Carla Hudson Kam, Canada Research Chair in Language Acquisition, Dept of Linguistics, UBC

Almost all languages require speakers to situate the events and states they are describing in time, often through tense and aspect affixes attached to verbs – things like -ed and -ing. In English, for example, we indicate whether something is happening now, has already happened in the past or will happen in the future (tense); and we relate events to other events, indicating, for instance, that one event happened before another or while another event was unfolding (aspect). Children have to learn which of a variety of possible temporal meanings their language encodes and how the meanings are encoded (e.g., what the specific affixes are and what they mean). However, we have little idea how they learn this information. The speech children hear is not very useful in this regard. We often talk to children about objects that are physically present at the time of speaking, but when discussing actions or activities, we rarely describe something as it is happening, so mapping from form to meaning is more complicated than it is for nouns and objects. However, there is one source of input many children get (that we know is helpful for leaning other aspects of language) where the mapping problem is potentially solved for them – books. Children’s picture books often have illustrations showing the event being described in the text, illustrations that could help children learn tense and aspect contrasts in their language. In this talk I will describe a new research program I am just starting (in collaboration with Lisa Matthewson), the goal of which is to explore whether (and how) picture books can help children learn tense and aspect.

All welcome! Feel free to bring your lunch.