Isabelle Dautriche

• PhD
• PostDoc Position at University of Edinburgh

Compositionality is a means of constructing complex objects through the transformation and combination of simpler elements. While it is common to view compositionality as inherently complex, and thus to assume that compositionality is a byproduct of advanced language expertise, we argue otherwise. We propose that, although compositionality produces...

In humans, simple 2D visual displays of launching events (“Michottean launches”) can evoke the impression of causality. Direct launching events are regarded as causal, but similar events with a temporal and/or spatial gap between the movements of the two objects, as non-causal. This ability to distinguish between causal and non-causal events is per...

Speech and co‐speech gestures always go hand in hand. Whether we find the precursors of these co‐speech gestures in infants before they master their native language still remains an open question. Except for deictic gestures, there is little agreement on the existence of iconic, non‐referential and conventional gestures before children start produc...

We know little about the mechanisms through which leader–follower dynamics during dyadic play shape infants’ language acquisition. We hypothesized that infants’ decisions to visually explore a specific object signal focal increases in endogenous attention, and that when caregivers respond to these proactive behaviors by naming the object it boosts...

In humans, simple 2D visual displays of launching events (“Michottean launches”) can evoke the impression of causality. Direct 8 launching events are regarded as causal, but similar events with a temporal and/or spatial gap between the movements of the 9 two objects, as non-causal. This ability to distinguish between causal and non-causal events is...

Humans spontaneously and consistently map information coming from different sensory modalities. Surprisingly, the phylogenetic origin of such cross-modal correspondences has been under-investigated. A notable exception is the study of Ludwig et al. (Visuoauditory mappings between high luminance and high pitch are shared by chimpanzees [Pan troglody...

Humans spontaneously and consistently map information coming from different sensory modalities. Surprisingly, the phylogenetic origin of such cross-modal correspondences has been under-investigated. A notable exception is the study of Ludwig et al (2011) which reports that both humans and chimpanzees spontaneously map high-pitched sounds to bright...

In this letter, we argue against a recurring idea that early word learning in infants is related to the low‐level capacity for backward associations—a notion that suggests a cognitive gap with other animal species. Because backward associations entail the formation of bidirectional associations between sequentially perceived stimulus pairs, they se...

The grammatical paradigm used to be a model for entire areas of cognitive science. Its primary tenet was that theories are axiomatic‐like systems. A secondary tenet was that their predictions should be tested quickly and in great detail with introspective judgments. While the grammatical paradigm now often seems passé, we argue that in fact it cont...

In ‘Being pragmatic about syntactic bootstrapping’, Hacquard (2022) argues that abstract syntax is useful for word learning, but that an additional cue, pragmatics, is both necessary and available for young children during the first steps of language acquisition. She focuses on modals and attitude verbs, where the physical context seems particularl...

Much of our basic understanding of cognitive and social processes in infancy relies on measures of looking time, and specifically on infants’ visual preference for a novel or familiar stimulus. However, despite being the foundation of many behavioral tasks in infant research, the determinants of infants’ visual preferences are poorly understood, an...

Can non-human animals combine abstract representations much like humans do with language? In particular, can they entertain a compositional representation such as ‘not blue’? Across two experiments, we demonstrate that baboons (Papio papio) show a capacity for compositionality. Experiment 1 showed that baboons can entertain negative, compositional,...

We studied the fundamental issue of whether children evaluate the reliability of their language interpretation, that is, their confidence in understanding words. In two experiments, 2-year-olds (Experiment 1: N = 50; Experiment 2: N = 60) saw two objects and heard one of them being named; both objects were then hidden behind screens and children we...

Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. This is syntactic bootstrapping. A learner that uses syntactic bootstrapping to foster lexical acquisition must first have identified the semantic information that a syntactic context provides. Based on the semantic seed hypothesis, children discov...

Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down itsprobable meaning. This is syntactic bootstrapping. A learner that uses syntacticbootstrapping to foster lexical acquisition must first have identified the semanticinformation that a syntactic context provides. Based on the semantic seed hypothesis,children discover t...

This chapter applies a language design perspective to the lexicon. It reviews and synthesizes a body of work in cognitive science and linguistics that uses ideas from computer science, specifically information theory, to explore how structural features of lexicons can be explained by principles of efficient communication. It pays particular attenti...

Learning is often accompanied by a subjective sense of confidence in one’s knowledge, a feeling of knowing what you know and how well you know it. Subjective confidence has been shown to guide learning in other domains, but has received little attention so far in the word learning literature. Across three word learning experiments, we investigated...

Learning is often accompanied by a subjective sense of confidence in one's knowledge, a feeling of knowing what you know and how well you know it. Subjective confidence has been shown to guide learning in other domains, but has received little attention so far in the word learning literature. Across three word learning experiments, we investigated...

We study the fundamental issue of whether children evaluate the reliability of their language interpretation, i.e., their confidence in understanding words. In two experiments, two-year- olds (n1 = 50; n2 = 60) saw two objects and heard one of them being named; both objects were then hidden behind screens and children were asked to look towards the...

There has been little investigation of the way source monitoring, the ability to track the source of one’s knowledge, may be involved in lexical acquisition. In two experiments, we tested whether toddlers (mean age 30 months) can monitor the source of their lexical knowledge and reevaluate their implicit belief about a word mapping when this source...

There has been little investigation of the way source monitoring, the ability to track the source of one’s knowledge, may be involved in lexical acquisition. In two experiments, we tested whether toddlers (mean age 30 months) can monitor the source of their lexical knowledge and re-evaluate their implicit belief about a word mapping when this sourc...

This work applies a language design perspective to the lexicon. It reviews and analyzes a recent body of work in cognitive science and linguistics that uses ideas from computer science, specifically information theory, to explore how structural features of lexicons can be explained by principles of efficient communication. It pays particular attent...

Because linguistic communication is often noisy and uncertain, adults flexibly rely on different information sources during sentence processing. We tested whether toddlers engage in a similar process and how that process interacts with verb learning. Across two experiments, we presented French 28-month-olds with right-dislocated sentences featuring...

Content words (e.g. nouns and adjectives) are generally connected: there are no gaps in their denotations; no noun means ‘table or shoe’ or ‘animal or house’. We explore a formulation of connectedness which is applicable to content and logical words alike, and which compares well with the classic notion of monotonicity for quantifiers. On a first i...

Using a pattern extraction task, we show that baboons, like humans, have a learning bias that helps them discover connected patterns more easily than disconnected ones—i.e., they favor rules like “contains between 40% and 80% red” over rules like “contains around 30% red or 100% red.” The task was made as similar as possible to a task previously ru...

Cognitive science applies diverse tools and perspectives to study human language. Recently, an exciting body of work has examined linguistic phenomena through the lens of efficiency in usage: what otherwise puzzling features of language find explanation in formal accounts of how language might be optimized for communication and learning? Here, we r...

Cognitive science applies diverse tools and perspectives to study human language. Recently, an exciting body of work has examined linguistic phenomena through the lens of efficiency in usage: what otherwise puzzling features of language find explanation in formal accounts of how language might be optimized for communication and learning? Here, we r...

Cognitive science applies diverse tools and perspectives to study human language. Recently, an exciting body of work has examined linguistic phenomena through the lens of efficiency in usage: what otherwise puzzling features of language find explanation in formal accounts of how language might be optimized for communication and learning? Here, we r...

Natural language involves competition. The sentences we choose to utter activate alternative sentences (those we chose not to utter), which hearers typically infer to be false. Hence, as a first approximation, the more alternatives a sentence activates, the more inferences it will trigger. But a closer look at the theory of competition shows that t...

Zipf famously stated that, if natural language lexicons are structured for efficient communication, the words that are used the most frequently should require the least effort. This observation explains the famous finding that the most frequent words in a language tend to be short. A related prediction is that, even within words of the same length,...

Even though ambiguous words are common in languages, children find it hard to learn homophones, where a single label applies to several distinct meanings (e.g., Mazzocco, 1997). The present work addresses this apparent discrepancy between learning abilities and typological pattern, with respect to homophony in the lexicon. In a series of five exper...

This chapter will review empirical findings on the perception of phrasal prosody in very young infants, and how it develops in first language acquisition. The ability to process phrasal prosody impacts learning of important aspects of language, specifically word segmentation and syntactic parsing. We will see that infants are able to perceive cruci...

Developmental research has long focused on regularities in language acquisition, minimizing factors that might be responsible for variation. Although researchers are now increasingly concerned with one or another of these factors, this volume brings together research on three different sources of variation: language-specific properties, the nature...

Recent evidence suggests that cognitive pressures associated with language acquisition and use could affect the organization of the lexicon. On one hand, consistent with noisy channel models of language (e.g., Levy, 2008), the phonological distance between wordforms should be maximized to avoid perceptual confusability (a pressure for dispersion)....

This study examined whether phrasal prosody can impact toddlers’ syntactic analysis. French noun-verb homophones were used to create locally ambiguous test sentences (e.g., using the homophone as a noun: [le bébé souris] [a bien mangé] - [the baby mouse] [ate well] or using it as a verb: [le bébé] [sourit à sa maman] - [the baby] [smiles to his mot...

In 1985, Laudau & Gleitman first outlined the syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis, in their book Language and Experience – Evidence from a blind child, followed in 1990 by Lila Gleitman’s article “The structural sources of verb meanings” (in Language Acquisition). They proposed that young children might learn the meaning of words (and in particular,...

Although the mapping between form and meaning is often regarded as arbitrary, there are in fact well-known constraints on words which are the result of functional pressures associated with language use and its acquisition. In particular, languages have been shown to encode meaning distinctions in their sound properties, which may be important for l...

The number of potential meanings for a new word is astronomic. To make the word-learning problem tractable, one must restrict the hypothesis space. To do so, current word learning accounts often incorporate constraints about cognition or about the mature lexicon directly in the learning device. We are concerned with the convexity constraint, which...

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How do children infer the meaning of a word? Current accounts of word learning assume that children expect a word to map onto exactly one concept whose members form a coherent category. If this assumption was strictly true, children should infer that a homophone, such as “bat”, refers to a single superordinate category that encompasses both animal-...

Two experiments were conducted to investigate whether young children are able to take into account phrasal prosody when computing the syntactic structure of a sentence. Pairs of French noun/verb homophones were selected to create locally ambiguous sentences ([la petite ferme] [est très jolie] 'the small farm is very nice' vs. [la petite] [ferme la...

Modern cognitive science of language concerns itself with (at least) two fundamental questions: how do humans learn language? —the learning problem —and why do the world’s languages exhibit some properties and not others? —the typology problem. In this dissertation, I attempt to link these two questions by looking at the lexicon, the set of word-fo...

One of the complex challenges language learners face concerns the acquisition of the syntactic structures of their native language. A rich literature suggests that a surface analysis of the speech signal could allow children to learn some aspects of the structure of their language (Morgan & Demuth, 1996). Specifically, since the prosodic structure...

The syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis proposes that syntactic structure provides children with cues for learning the meaning of novel words. In this article, we address the question of how children might start acquiring some aspects of syntax before they possess a sizeable lexicon. The study presents two models of early syntax acquisition that res...

Upon hearing a novel word, language learners must identify its correct meaning from a diverse set of situationally relevant options. Such referential ambiguity could be reduced through repetitive exposure to the novel word across diverging learning situations, a learning mechanism referred to as cross-situational learning. Previous research has foc...

In two experiments we investigated whether young children are able to use the position of a word within the prosodic structure to compute its syntactic category (noun vs. verb). Pairs of noun/verb homophones in French were used to create locally ambiguous sentences (e.g. [la petite ferme] [est jolie] the small farm is nice vs. [la petite] [ferme la...

Previous work has shown that toddlers readily encode each noun in the sentence as a distinct argument of the verb. However, languages allow multiple mappings between form and meaning that do not fit this canonical format. Two experiments examined French 28-month-olds' interpretation of right-dislocated sentences (nouni -verb, nouni ) where the pres...

How do infants start to acquire rudiments of syntax? We built a model evaluating the plausibility that function words and phrasal prosody may allow young children to build a first approximation of a syntactic tree, where prosodic boundaries correspond to syntactic constituent boundaries, and function words label these units (Noun Phrase, Verb Phras...

In this paper, we propose a conceptual and operational model for procedural texts, within Action theory. We propose some elements to model the complexity and expliciteness of instructions, showing, how, for a given execution of the procedure, the success of the goal can be measured. Next, we show how a procedure can be enriched via textual integrat...