Do 11-month-old French infants process articles?

pre-print: à paraître dansLanguage and SpeechThe first part of this study examined (Parisian) French-learning 11-month-old infants' recognition of the six definite and indefinite French articles: le, la, les, un, une, des. The six articles were compared with pseudo articles in the context of disyllabic or monosyllabic nouns, using the Head-turn Preference Procedure. The pseudo articles were similar to real articles in terms of phonetic composition and phonotactic probability, and real and pseudo noun phrases were alike in terms of overall prosodic contour. In three experiments, 11-month-old infants showed preference for real over pseudo articles, suggesting they have the articles' word-forms stored in long-term memory. The second part of the study evaluates several hypotheses about the role of articles in 11-month-olds infants' word recognition. Evidence from three experiments support the view that articles help infants to recognize the following words. We propose that 11-month-olds have the capacity to parse noun phrases into their constituents, which is consistent with the more general view that function words define a syntactic skeleton that serves as a basis for parsing spoken utterances. This proposition is compared to a competing account, which argues that 11-month-olds recognize noun-phrases as whole-words

The ITALK project : A developmental robotics approach to the study of individual, social, and linguistic learning

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Frank Broz et al, “The ITALK Project: A Developmental Robotics Approach to the Study of Individual, Social, and Linguistic Learning”, Topics in Cognitive Science, Vol 6(3): 534-544, June 2014, which has been published in final form at doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/tops.12099 This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving." Copyright © 2014 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.This article presents results from a multidisciplinary research project on the integration and transfer of language knowledge into robots as an empirical paradigm for the study of language development in both humans and humanoid robots. Within the framework of human linguistic and cognitive development, we focus on how three central types of learning interact and co-develop: individual learning about one's own embodiment and the environment, social learning (learning from others), and learning of linguistic capability. Our primary concern is how these capabilities can scaffold each other's development in a continuous feedback cycle as their interactions yield increasingly sophisticated competencies in the agent's capacity to interact with others and manipulate its world. Experimental results are summarized in relation to milestones in human linguistic and cognitive development and show that the mutual scaffolding of social learning, individual learning, and linguistic capabilities creates the context, conditions, and requisites for learning in each domain. Challenges and insights identified as a result of this research program are discussed with regard to possible and actual contributions to cognitive science and language ontogeny. In conclusion, directions for future work are suggested that continue to develop this approach toward an integrated framework for understanding these mutually scaffolding processes as a basis for language development in humans and robots.Peer reviewe

Do production patterns influence the processing of speech in prelinguistic infants?

The headturn preference procedure was used to test 18 infants on their response to three different passages chosen to reflect their individual production patterns. The passages contained nonwords with consonants in one of three categories: (a) often produced by that infant (‘own’), (b) rarely produced by that infant but common at that age (‘other’), and (c) not generally produced by infants. Infants who had a single ‘own’ consonant showed no significant preference for either ‘own’ (a) or ‘other’ (b) passages. In contrast, infants’ with two ‘own’ consonants exhibited greater attention to ‘other’ passages (b). Both groups attended equally to the passage featuring consonants rarely produced by infants of that age (c). An analysis of a sample of the infant-directed speech ruled out the mothers’ speech as a source of the infant preferences. The production-based shift to a focus on the ‘other’ passage suggests that nascent production abilities combine with emergent perceptual experience to facilitate word learning

Motor cognition–motor semantics: Action perception theory of cognition and communication

A new perspective on cognition views cortical cell assemblies linking together knowledge about actions and perceptions not only as the vehicles of integrated action and perception processing but, furthermore, as a brain basis for a wide range of higher cortical functions, including attention, meaning and concepts, sequences, goals and intentions, and even communicative social interaction. This article explains mechanisms relevant to mechanistic action perception theory, points to concrete neuronal circuits in brains along with artificial neuronal network simulations, and summarizes recent brain imaging and other experimental data documenting the role of action perception circuits in cognition, language and communication

Négation syntaxique et négation lexicale chez les jeunes enfants

De Boysson-Bardies Bénédicte. Négation syntaxique et négation lexicale chez les jeunes enfants. In: Langages, 4ᵉ année, n°16, 1969. Psycholinguistique et grammaire générative, sous la direction de Jacques Mehler. pp. 111-118

Psycholinguistique, messages et codage verbal.

de Boysson-Bardies B., Mehler Jacques. Psycholinguistique, messages et codage verbal. In: L'année psychologique. 1969 vol. 69, n°2. pp. 561-598

Psycholinguistique, messages et codage verbal. Deuxième partie : Etudes sur le rappel de phrases

Mehler Jacques, de Boysson-Bardies B. Psycholinguistique, messages et codage verbal. Deuxième partie : Etudes sur le rappel de phrases. In: L'année psychologique. 1971 vol. 71, n°2. pp. 547-581