LangCog Seminar - Samuel Forbes

Much research has highlighted the fact that infants are highly talented word learners, first comprehending, then producing, new words with great industry. This general success belies the vast scale of the individual differences that make up early word learning, and early language abilities more generally. In this talk I attempt to move beyond benchmarking infant word learning, and discuss the factors that give rise to or exacerbate these individual differences. Using a combination of parental report, wearable devices, eye-tracking, MRI, and fNIRS, I present a range of data linking infant language exposure, word learning environments, environmental cues, and individual differences in memory and attention. Taken together our findings highlight both the fallacy of focusing on group performance and the importance of these individual differences in understanding what helps and hinders language development.

Dr Samuel Forbes is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Durham University, and a Fellow of both the Durham Research Methods Centre and the Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing.

Dr Forbes’s research focuses on the interplay between early cognition and word learning in infants, exploring how cognitive and environmental factors shape early language development. His work at the Durham Babylab employs a range of methods including fNIRS, eye-tracking, and behavioural observation to study how infants interact with their environments to learn.

In addition to his developmental research, Dr Forbes is active in metascience and Open Scholarship, developing tools and software to support transparent and reproducible research practices.