Social Context

The Social Context group of the NCCR Evolving Language deals with systematically deconstructing the social environment of ontogeny.

For Miranda's project in particular, we would like to understand exactly how the social information surrounding infant development enables infants to disambiguate meaning. In other words, we are asking: how do infants operationalise their social knowledge and input to learn about language? To pursue this question, she will apply a combination of observational, experimental, and computational approaches, primarily by building a cross-sectional corpus of child language acquisition of Vietnamese. This corpus will be specially designed so as to (a) maximise comparability with the data collected by the Early Surround and Social Context groups, and (b) allow for application of state-of-the-art machine learning approaches for analysis of the collected data.