Faculty of Science, Technology and Medicine
Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance
Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences
Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust
Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine
Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History
Luxembourg Centre for European Law
Luxembourg Centre for Socio-Environmental Systems
By the end of the second year of life many children are speaking in sentences. What are the underpinnings of this capability? One task children face is to find events in the world and divide them into the units that will be expressed in their native language. Different languages describe the exact same event in diverse ways. While some progress has been made in understanding how monolingual infants and toddlers discern how their language encodes events, we present the first studies that describe how children learning multiple languages approach the task. This research is by necessity at the nexus of event perception, language development, and conceptual representations.
Speaker
Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, PhD, is the Unidel H. Rodney Sharp Professor of Education at the University of Delaware. Devoted to dissemination and translational science, her research (funded by the Federal government and the LEGO Foundation), focuses on playful learning, media, spatial development, and language acquisition. She is a founder of the Learning Sciences Exchange, Playful Learning Landscapes, Stories with Clever Hedgehog for Ukrainian children, and created the QUILS: Quick Interactive Language Screeners for young children. Of her 17 books and monographs, her penultimate book, Making Schools Work, reached the NY Times best seller list. It offers an active playful learning approach for improving education. Her latest book, Einstein Never Used Flashcards (2026), is designed to help harried parents and hurried children slow down and appreciate the value of playful learning.