>> DANIEL DIERMEIER: As Provost of the University of Chicago. I am pleased to introduce Amanda Woodward who will present today's Convocation Address.
Amanda is the William S. Gray Professor in the Department of Psychology and the College and Deputy Dean for Faculty Affairs in the Division of the Social Sciences
Professor Woodward has pioneered experimental methods to investigate social cognition in the very young. She has contributed fundamental
insights into understanding the conceptual development of infants and young children
and as a founding member of the Universities Center for Early Childhood Research, Professor Woodward
has revealed that even infants can appreciate how human actions are structured by intention ‑‑ her current research
focuses on social cognitive development, including understanding how social structures shape the way children learn.
Professor Woodward has received numerous awards and her research has been supported by the National Science
Foundation, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the McCormick Foundation.
In 2014, Professor Woodward was elected to the American Academy of Arts and sciences.
She's a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the American Psychological Association
and past President of the Cognitive Development Society. She also serves on the editorial
board of the Journal Development Science and on the board of directors of the University
of Chicago Lab Schools. Professor Woodward first joined the faculty at the University
of Chicago in 1993. The title of her talk today is "Learning to Speak," Amanda.
>> AMANDA WOODWARD: Congratulations, graduates. And congratulations
to the parents, partners and families and friends who have made it possible for you
to come this point. I'm honored to be here to share this day with you. Now what an achievement.
This ceremony celebrates the culmination of your hard work, your passion, and your brilliance
and you're poised at a point of transition, anticipating what comes next and thinking
about, thinking back to your first days at the University of Chicago. And I am, too,
thinking back. And so I wanted to start by telling you about the first time I visited
this campus in 1993. To interview for a job as Assistant Professor in the Psychology
Department. At that time I was a newly minted PhD. I already had one job interview at a
respectable East Coast university. And while at that university, I had given the department
a lecture about my research in academics, we call that lecture "a job talk." And the audience was
mainly professors and graduate students listened quite politely. They held their questions until the end and
then their questions were total soft balls. It was cozy, a comfortable visit in all.
Now things were a little different when several weeks later I was invited to interview at
the University of Chicago. I was a few sentences into my talk when a man in the back row stood
up to tell me at length and with rising animation that my starting assumptions were deeply and
completely flawed. [Laughter]
It was pretty of open season after that. [Laughter]
Each claim I made, each data point I presented was met with furrowed browse, muttered side
conversations and very challenging questions, zingers. Sometimes other people would answer
the question before I could get a word in and just launched a kind of open debate about
my research: So I had an immediate gut level response to
this unruly group of academics: I was intrigued. I was invigorated. I jumped into the fray.
Now, to be honest, I was emboldened by the fact that I had an offer in hand from the
other university, and I fully intended to accept the job, so I had nothing to lose.
I thought, "these people may not agree with me, but they are definitely listening to me.
And they certainly care about what I have to say. They may care a little too much."
[Laughter] By the end of a long argument‑filled day,
I had the growing sense that I had found my intellectual home.
Now, that interview was an accurate indicator of what was to come. I've had a career here
filled with challenging and productive conversations. I've acquired a deep appreciation of a culture
in which people say what they think and listen hard to what others say.
I've come to see focused, critical attention to a person's words as a great sign of respect.
And I have realized again and again how essential argument is for refining one's ideas. The
pointed questions at my job talk were on target. And several of them were the start of conversations
that have played out over years and shaped my thinking in important ways. I've also come
to understand that disagreements don't always get resolved. They can persist for a lifetime.
Nevertheless you can learn a great deal from and like and even love the people you disagree
with. Imagine that this rings true with your experiences here, and I trust that this is
a part of your shared tradition that you're all going to take with you to your next ventures.
Now, traditions can certainly change, and we are in fact witnessing a change today.
After 529 quarterly convocations, today's ceremony is the last quarterly convocation.
The university is going to begin the practice of holding only annual spring ceremonies in
the coming year. Now, change is inevitable. It's often poignant.
And sometimes for the better. In fact in my time here, there have been many changes for the better. Pedestrian zones and landscaping
cover what were once city streets. Insomnia cookies have come to campus. And so have food
trucks with quirky names like the Tamale Space Ship. Bruge Brothers and my personal favorite the
Pierogi Wagon. And the college has grown and become remarkably
more diverse at the time that it's risen dramatically in national rankings. The Chicago ivory
tower has made considerable peace with engaging real world problems. From problems in education to energy policy to the multidimensional
problems that confront cities. But at the same time, we have brand new high‑rise dormitories
that happen to look a lot like ivory towers. Now, what has not changed is the centrality
of open and vigorous discourse in our academic culture. Now the right to speak freely is of course
at the heart of our national identity. In academic life, freedom of expression is
critical to the honest and full testing of ideas and to the transmission of knowledge.
The past two years have been a time of reflection on campus about our shared value of free expression.
The report on freedom of expression from the committee that was led by Jeff stone has invigorated discussions,
sometimes quite contentious discussions about how the principles of free expression should
be implemented in the practices of our community. Now, my thinking on these issues is informed
not only by my fondness for argumentative colleagues but also by the fact that I studied
origins of speech or more precisely I study the cognitive processes that enable infants to get a first
grasp on language. And I study infants because they lack all the adult layers of self‑doubt
and second guessing and reputation management. They show us in a direct way what's most true
about human nature. When I was a graduate student I gave language lessons to one‑year‑olds.
They were very simple lessons. I'd hold up an unfamilar object, I used kitchen gadgets, like
garlic presses. And I'd tell the baby it's made up name. I'd say this is a Dax. I did this with hundreds of infants, maybe
a thousand infants one baby at a time. And the babies would listen, wide eyed, cute,
very baby‑like. And the remarkable thing was that they would remember what the Dax was
even after hearing the word just a few times. And even after a long delay. The human mind
is hungry for language. Now, when I started those studies, I thought about word learning purely as a logical
problem, a matter of connecting a symbol to its meaning. I had lost track of something
important. I had lost track of the fact that language is at its core a medium for social
expression. That was my colleague Rick Shwader's point when he stood up at my job talk and told me
my starting assumptions were all wrong. He was right. And eventually I saw that.
My language lessons worked, not just because they provided babies with words and meanings,
but also because they did so in the context of a communicative exchange. Language learning
happens in conversations and it's driven by the goal of sharing ideas. In the many years
since my job talk, I spent most of my time investigating the rich social knowledge that
babies bring to bear in the enterprise of language learning. It turns out that from
the beginning, babies respond to speech by looking for cues to what the speaker, the
ideas that the speaker intends to convey. They understand that words have a special
status as shared forms for communicating. And when they themselves contribute to the
conversation, they're eager for signs that they're meaning has been recognized. From the start,
speech emerges in conversation and it is for conversation. And I think this has implications
for how we should understand the value of free expression. Many of the salient controversies
over free expression focuses on instance in which the speech is viewed as something like a
missile, a launched into the void. A tweet, a slur, writing on a wall, real or Facebook
wall. Provocative lecture. But this way of thinking misses a central function of speech. It is the
medium of conversation, the back and forth presenting of and responding to ideas. Even
the missile cases can become parts of conversations at longer time scales and cross broader groups
of interlocutors. A critical function of speaking, freely, is
the improved understanding that might if we are lucky result from the discussion. Insight
does not come from a single proclamation but instead from the conversation that follows.
Now, speech also connects people to one another in ways that go beyond individual conversations.
Shared ways of communicating bind members of an entire community together. And at the same
time, diversity in these practices can separate communities from one another. Indeed, patterns
of speech, the language that is spoken, the accent with which one speaks, even the particular
terms one favors are potent signals of the social group to which a person belongs. This
kind of diversity can impede conversations that cross social divides, not only because
of a lack of shared vocabulary but because people have a strong tendency to resistance to the messages
of outsiders. Now babies reveal this tendency in obvious, concrete ways. When introduced
to one person who speaks in a familiar language or with a familiar accent, and another person
who speaks in an unfamiliar one, babies show a strong preference for the familiar speaker.
They attend to her more, they're more eager to interact with her, and they prefer to learn
the information that she has to offer. My colleague. Katie Kinzler discovered these patterns
in infant behavior and she and her students have found that these initial preferences can develop in
worrying directions. Older children prefer to befriend children with familiar rather than foreign
accents. They're actually biased to associate foreign speakers with contamination. When life doesn't
let babies avoid the challenge of diversity, things go better. So my student Lauren Howard and I found
that babies' tendency to avoid learning from foreigners depends upon the linguistic diversity
of the neighbors in which they live. Babies who live in neighborhoods like Hyde Park where
in the space of a few blocks you will hear Spanish and Polish and Chinese are more open‑minded.
They're happy to learn what the foreign speaker has to offer. Further, Kinzler our student Zoe Lieberman
and I found that infants who live among speakers of diverse languages show enhanced skills in perspective taking,
that's the ability to understand whether your conversation partner sees things the same
way you do. They're also less likely than are babies from monolingual environments to
view the way a person speaks as a marker of that person's social identity.
Now, diversity is the natural compliment to free expression because it sets the conditions
for productive, even transformative, conversations. The task for universities as communities that
are in the business of generating new knowledge and teaching the next generation of thinkers
is to promote the conditions that allow conversations to develop fruitfully, conversations that
span disciplines, that bring together people of different backgrounds, and critically that
connects scholarly work to the world outside of the academy. Now, I'm quite proud of the
way this university undertakes these tasks. At the same time, it's important not to underestimate
the difficulty of sustaining this work. It's an effort that pushes against the basic human
tendency to prefer familiar voices. These are challenging times for sustaining free
expression on college campuses and more generally. And to be honest, I worry about the uncertainties that lie
ahead. To my mind the most concerning developments are the divisions that have sharpened between
communities and that present barriers for reaching a shared understanding of what's
true and important. Even so, I have to say that I am genuinely
optimistic about the future when I consider how ready all of you are to meet it. So my
advice to you as you leave this place and begin the next adventures of your lives is
that you remember what you have learned here. Engage in thoughtful argument. Don't shy away
from the hard analysis of the ideas that other people present. Put your own ideas to the
test by sharing them with people who differ from you in their experiences and opinions.
And learn from the people that you disagree with. Thank you and congratulations.
[Applause.]