Title: "Language is for Learning: Connecting Language and Cognition in Development"

Abstract: Human language acquisition has intrigued scholars for millennia, presenting a deeply difficult learning problem that is nonetheless reliably solved by infants, long before they can tie their shoes. My work explores how children begin this process of learning language, and how, as they do so, the words they hear guide what they learn about the world. In this talk, I will examine how language supports key cognitive capacities like memory and categorization, and then show how children can use the words and concepts they have already learned to infer the meanings of even more new words. I'll conclude by examining some cognitive constraints on this word learning process and how it may change across development.