Speaker: Isabelle Dautriche (Psychology & Neuroscience, Aix-Marseille University).

Title: Language Foundations: Insights from Acquisition, Communication, Cognition and More.

Abstract: Human languages exhibit an incredible diversity, from the sounds they use to form words to the grammatical rules they follow. Despite this variation, languages share deep structural properties like compositionality and exhibit striking regularities, such as a preference for placing subjects before objects. How do children manage to quickly learn such diverse languages? Why do languages share certain properties while differing in others? Are some of these properties deeply rooted in our cognition? In my talk, I will provide an overview on how I address these questions through experimental data from infants and animals, computational modeling, and corpus data. I will offer some evidence that infants are remarkably adept learners, that communication shapes language, and that several properties of language can be explained by non-linguistic cognition shared with other species. 

Faculty wishing to meet with Dr. Dautriche during the day are invited to contact Yi Ting Huang <ythuang1 [at] umd.edu>

Grad students wanting to have lunch with Dr. Dautriche (12:15-1:30) are invited to contact Robert Ragsdale <rragsdal [at] umd.edu>