LMA Seminar, Dr. Isabelle Dautriche

Looking for the roots of semantic primitives in infancy and in non-humans

Abstract:
Human languages share a number of universal architectural features, from atomic meaning properties (e.g., connectedness, Gärdenfors, 2000) to how these meanings combine to generate more complex senses (i.e., compositionality). In this line of work, we investigate experimentally the cognitive origins of these shared features of language in pre-linguistic infants and non-human primates to determine whether these features reflect properties of the language faculty or rather domain-general forces potentially shared across cognitive systems and species.

Bio:
Isabelle Dautriche is a CNRS researcher working at the Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive (LPC). Her research focuses on language development and its link to the structure of languages. How do children quickly learn such a complex system? Why are languages the way they are? To answer these questions she relies on psycholinguistic
experiments with infants and more recently with non-human primates which she combines with computational methods to study the structure of languages.

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