On the afternoon of June 1, 2023, Dr. Wang Tianlin from the State University of New York, Albany, gave a special lecture titled "Language Experience and Cognitive Development in Infants and Young Children" in Room 110 of the Nan Da Lou. The lecture was hosted by Professor Liang Dandan, the head of the linguistics program at our college, and some teachers, master's and doctoral students, and related interdisciplinary students from the language science program participated in the lecture.

       

       The development of language acquisition and cognitive ability is an important issue in the field of children's language acquisition. With this as the starting point, Dr. Wang Tianlin first explored how the acoustic characteristics of child directed language affect the language acquisition device of infants with experimental phonetics technology as the core method. Teacher Wang pointed out that although the researchers generally believes that children directed language can promote children's language acquisition, such as vocabulary acquisition and syntactic development, the experimental results have not showed sufficient evidence; and emphasized that whether children directed language has a positive effect on language acquisition still needs to be demonstrated by empirical results in different languages and cultural backgrounds. In the second part of the lecture, teacher Wang focused on how to build an open-source corpus of children's

books and explored the impact of reading input on children's gender representation. The results showed that the author's language description of the protagonist in the picture book can affect the construction of children's gender awareness. This study has certain implications for parents' choice of children's books and the writing and publication of related books.

In the context of the "Xin Wenke ", linguistic research increasingly needs the support of knowledge and methods from different disciplines. Starting from the core issues in the field of children's language acquisition, Dr. Wang Tianlin has carried out research using the technologies and methods of experimental phonetics and computational linguistics respectively, to conduct scientific discussions on theoretical issues, which achieved the organic combination of theoretical orientation and data driven. This lecture broadened the academic horizon and provided valuable experience for our linguistics graduate students.