Invited keynote talk given to the Malaysia International Conference on Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (MICOLLAC), May 2007. Interpreting Experience: Clues from the Study of Language Acquisition

All three of the disciplines represented at this conference are deeply and intimately concerned with experience: language allows us to express it, literature helps us interpret it, and culture offers ways to organize and institutionalize it. This in turn leads to the following fundamental question, which also happens to be a central concern of cognitive science: how does the mind make sense of experience, not only in the formative early years, but also throughout life? It’s not clear that this question can or should be approached in the same way in the study of language as it is in the study of literature or the study of culture. However, it is perhaps not unrealistic to hope for parallels in the way in which the question might be investigated. At the very least, the study of how the mind responds to experience in one domain may yield findings that can be contrasted and compared with those obtained from the investigation of other domains. With that in mind, I propose to explore this question from a linguistic point of view, offering suggestions that will, presumably, be of greatest interest to those working in the fields of linguistics and applied linguistics, but may nonetheless raise questions (o