Lecture
Michael Erard: “How we pay attention to first words”
In collaboration with the CRBLM, the Montreal Bilingualism Initiative (https://www.mcgill.ca/mobi/) will host Michael Erard, Ph.D., as our first guest speaker of 2023. Coffee & Snacks will be provided! Registration recommended (below).
Abstract: How we pay attention to first words
Four different approaches to young children’s first words have emerged in different places and eras. As part of a larger linguistic and cultural history of first words of babies and last words of the dying, I drew from historical and anthropological accounts to develop this taxonomy, to account for different modes of attention by adults, how these have changed, and factors that drive these changes. Interestingly, some of the changes in attention to first words parallel some changes in attention to dying utterances, which I will briefly discuss.
About Michael Erard, Ph.D.: Michael is a writer and linguist. His journalism has appeared in The Atlantic, Science, The New York Times, and other outlets, and his scholarship has appeared in Omega, Language & Communication, and Anthropologie et Sociétés. He is a 2023-2024 Public Scholars Fellow with the US National Endowment for the Humanities and was the first writer in residence at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands.