Isabelle Dautriche, chercheuse au CNRS spécialisée dans le langage et fortement impliquée dans le labo des minots à Marseille, viendra présenter ses travaux sur le langage lors du séminaire de l’axe 1 du laboratoire.
Résumé
A defining feature of language is compositionality: the meaning of a complex expression is a function of the meaning of its parts. While the compositional system in language has been studied for decades, surprising little is known about the development of compositional understanding: Infants start to build their content word lexicon from 6 months of age but their ability to understand sentences compositionally is only rigorously attested when they are older than 2. The question then is what happens in the second year of life? Is it possible to identify steps in the development of the compositional system? I will present some recent results on the development of compositional language in infancy which suggest that compositional language that is both systematic and productive may arise much later than previously thought.