Speaker: Dr Saloni Krishnan, Reader, Royal Holloway, University of London

Saloni is an expert in communication development, and she is generally interested in brain organisation in atypical and typical children. Her current research focuses on understanding how motivation and reward influence language learning, using behavioural, computational and MRI techniques.

Title: “The role of intrinsic reward and motivation in language learning”

Abstract: The issue of why we learn words has received relatively little attention in the language learning literature. In my talk, I’ll describe two new lines of work from my lab that highlight the effect of intrinsic motivation and reward on word learning. First, I will discuss work that suggests that learning the meaning of novel words in a naturalistic and contextual paradigm is intrinsically rewarding. I will demonstrate that this is regardless of whether adults learned words while reading or listening. Importantly, we find that intrinsic reward also fuels long-term memory for words. I will also describe preliminary findings from a recent registered report, where we are examining this relationship in adolescents. Second, I will focus on whether states of epistemic curiosity, likely to reflect intrinsic motivation for knowledge, affect word learning. Our results indicate that adults are willing to wait for definitions of words for which they express curiosity, once again suggesting that semantic learning is intrinsically rewarding. In addition, we find that the discrepancy between curiosity and satisfaction can predict the likelihood of remembering a word’s meaning a day later. I will finally highlight similarities and differences in the relationship between curiosity and long-term memory in individuals with dyslexia. Together, I will argue that these two lines of work underscore the importance of understanding intrinsic reward and motivation during word learning across different populations of learners.

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