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.

Email Mingtong LiLink opens in a new window for Teams link.

Dear friends and colleagues

We are delighted to invite you to a reception for PhD students, post-doc researchers and lecturers interested in language learning psychology. Join us for refreshments and a buffet lunch, and help us mark two years of the Language Learning Psychology PhD Community (LLP).

The event will be held in person on Wednesday 23 November 2022, 1–2.30pm, in room OC0.01, Oculus Building, University of Warwick (see interactive mapLink opens in a new window for exact location). To register, please complete this formLink opens in a new window by Wednesday 16 November.

Established in 2020, LLPLink opens in a new window aims to connect PhD students and post-docs based around the world to help share research, improve presenting skills and support each other through our researcher journeys.

This event will be a celebration of the group’s achievements and an opportunity to thank everyone who has been involved over the past two years. There will be short presentations detailing the types of activities we organise and sharing our plans for the future. There will be plenty of time for questions and discussions, and hopefully some new faces will consider joining the community.

Please share with any postgraduate research students, post-doctoral researchers or colleagues who may be interested in attending. The reception is followed later in the afternoon by Dr Sal Consoli’s talk on ‘Life capital: a novel lens for language-education research’ as part of Warwick University’s weekly Applied Linguistics seminarLink opens in a new window.

We look forward to meeting you soon,

Kathryn Sidaway, Denny Vlaeva and Katarina Mentzelopoulos

Universities of Warwick and Nottingham

Contact: kathryn.sidaway@warwick.ac.uk 

This event is jointly funded by the ESRC and the University of Warwick Doctoral College PGR Networking Fund