CSC - Isabelle Dautriche / Language Foundations
CSC - Isabelle Dautriche / Language Foundations
November 21, the Cognitive Science Colloquium has Isabelle Dautriche from the Center for Research in Psychology and Neurosciences at Aix-Marseilles University, discussing her work on the foundations of human language, building on "insights from acquisition, communication, cognition and more." Her talk is abstracted below.
Language Foundations: Insights from acquisition, communication, cognition and more
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.