Guest speaker: Myrto Grigoroglou (University of Toronto)

We are very pleased to host a guest talk by Myrto Grigoroglou (postdoc), who is currently working with Patricia Ganea (faculty, OISE) in the Language and Learning Lab. Her research is focused on language acquisition, particularly its intersections with cognitive development. Myrto's talk, "Pragmatic inference in language acquisition and use," will be taking place on Friday, January 24, at 3:00 PM, in SS560A.

A design feature of the human language is that what a speaker means often goes beyond what the speaker says. To become competent communicators, children need to learn how to bridge the gap between the semantic meaning of words and the intended, pragmatic meaning of an utterance. In this talk, I will describe my work on how semantics and pragmatics interact over the course of language acquisition. I will first present evidence on children's ability to tailor their speech to the informational needs of other people. I will argue that the likelihood of children adjusting their speech to the needs of their listener depends on the cognitive load of each specific listener-oriented adjustment and the nature of the communicative exchange. Next, I will examine the role of pragmatic inference in the children's acquisition and use of spatial terms. I will argue that cross-linguistically robust patterns of spatial language emergence do not solely index semantic development but may also be linked to pragmatic factors. Finally, I will briefly show that pragmatic factors may similarly affect spatial language use in adults across languages . Together, these studies shed light on the mechanisms underlying children's ability to integrate pragmatic inference in to the language use.