Antônio De Carvalho
Biographic Data
| ID | 1384891 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Antônio De Carvalho |
| GIVEN NAMES | Antônio |
| FAMILY NAME | De Carvalho |
| SIGNATURE | DE CARVALHO A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2938-0049 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Executive functions as mediators between family socio-economic status and pre-academic abilities in early preschool children
Academic achievement in children is strongly shaped by their family’s socio-economic status (SES). Executive functions (EFs)—a set of high-level cognitive functions that enable individuals to set and achieve goals—may mediate this association. In a representative sample of 2,618 preschoolers (mean age = 42.61 ± 3.41 months; 1,254 girls), we found that EFs partly mediate the SES–pre-academic skills link. SES-related inequalities in numeracy and or…
“Really, he dased the doll to the girl?” Two-year-olds can exploit grammatical and thematic content to learn novel verb meanings
Infants exploit the syntactic context verbs appear in to guide verb learning: a mechanism known as syntactic bootstrapping . However, it remains unclear whether infants' bootstrapping representations are achieved by matching the number of nouns in a sentence to the number of participants in an event, or by exploiting a more specific mapping between syntactic positions and thematic roles. To investigate this, we tested toddlers' ability to learn t…
Month-Olds Can Use Negative Evidence While Learning Word Meanings
Decades of research in psychology have built models and theoretical assumptions about language development evaluating how children extract information from positive evidence to learn the meanings of novel words. In the present set of studies, we evaluated whether children can also consider negative evidence, information about what a word cannot refer to. Across two experiments (n = 73), we show that English-learning 20-month-olds can use negative…
Brazilian-Portuguese-learning preschoolers use phrasal prosody to constrain their interpretation of ellipsis
Formação de médicos para atenção à saúde da comunidade lésbica, gay, bissexual e transgênero
Introdução: A discussão acerca do cuidado a saúde da população de Lésbicas, Gay, Bissexuais e Transgênero (LGBT) ainda se apresenta de forma insuficiente, no âmbito mundial e no Brasil. Este contexto pode ser atribuído, ao processo de formação de profissionais de saúde, que não são qualificados para o atendimento as demandas de saúde desta população. Objetivo: Verificar a configuração dos Projetos Político dos Cursos (PPCs) e Planos de Ensino (PE…
Cognitive Control Skills Are Related to Ambiguity Awareness in French‐Learning 5‐to‐6‐Year‐Olds
Five‐to‐six‐year‐olds’ abilities to detect and solve ambiguities in spoken language have been found to be a predictor of their later reading abilities in first‐to‐third grade. However, the origins of this relationship remain unclear. Success in ambiguity detection may be reflective of overall language attainment, which varies with socioeconomic status (SES) and is known to predict reading. Yet, it is also possible that children's ability to detec…
Learning to predict and predicting to learn
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 discover the semantic predictiveness of syntactic contexts by tracking the distribution of familiar words.…
English-learning preschoolers can correctly parse and interpret negative sentences to guide their interpretations of novel noun and verb meanings
We studied English-learning children’s ability to learn the meanings of novel words from sentences containing truth-functional negation (Exp1) and to use the semantics of negation to inform word meaning (Exp2). In Exp1, 22-month-olds (n = 21) heard dialogues introducing a novel verb in either negative-transitive (“Mary didn’t blick the baby”) or negative-intransitive (“Mary didn’t blick”) sentences. When then asked to “Find blicking!” while viewi…
There might be more to syntactic bootstrapping than being pragmatic
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 particularly impoverished as the sole basis for deriving meanings, and thus where linguistic cues may be partic…
Learning to predict and predicting to learn
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 the semantic predictiveness of syntactic contexts by tracking thedistribution of familiar words. We p…
“The tiger is hitting! the duck too!” 3-year-olds can use prosodic information to constrain their interpretation of ellipsis
Syntactic prediction adaptation accounts for language processing and language learning
Previous literature has shown that children use recent input to adapt their syntactic predictions, and use these adapted predictions to infer the meaning of novel words. The current study tested whether they could use this mechanism to disambiguate words that are ambiguous between a noun and a verbinterpretation. We tested two-to-four-year-old French children using the phrase la petite followed by a homophone that could be interpreted as either a…
Covid-19 first lockdown as a window into language acquisition
The COVID-19 pandemic, and the resulting closure of daycare centers worldwide, led to unprecedented changes in children’s learning environments. This period of increased time at home with caregivers, with limited access to external sources (e.g., daycares) provides a unique opportunity to examine the associations between the caregiver-child activities and children’s language development. The vocabularies of 1742 children aged 8-36 months across 1…
“ Look! It is not a bamoule! ”
Two word-learning experiments were conducted to investigate the understanding of negative sentences in 18- and 24-month-old children. In Experiment 1, after learning that bamoule means "penguin" and pirdaling means "cartwheeling," 18-month-olds (n = 48) increased their looking times when listening to negative sentences rendered false by their visual context ("Look! It is not a bamoule!" while watching a video showing a penguin cartwheeling); howe…
Syntactic Prediction Adaptation Accounts for Language Processing and Language Learning
A previous study has shown that children use recent input to adapt their syntactic predictions and use these adapted predictions to infer the meaning of novel words. In the current study, we investigated whether children could use this mechanism to disambiguate words whose interpretation as a noun or a verb is ambiguous. We tested 2- to 4-year-old French children using the phrase la petite followed by a homophone that could be interpreted as eith…
Familiar words can serve as a semantic seed for syntactic bootstrapping
Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. But how do they learn which contexts are linked to which semantic features in the first place? We investigate if 3- to 4-year-old children (n = 60) can learn about a syntactic context from tracking its use with only a few familiar words. After watching a 5-min training video in which a novel function word (i.e., 'ko') replaced either personal pro…
Studying the Real-Time Interpretation of Novel Noun and Verb Meanings in Young Children
Decades of research show that children rely on the linguistic context in which novel words occur to infer their meanings. However, because learning in these studies was assessed after children had heard numerous occurrences of a novel word in informative linguistic contexts, it is impossible to determine how much exposure would be needed for a child to learn from such information. This study investigated the speed with which French 20-month-olds …
Prosody and Function Words Cue the Acquisition of Word Meanings in 18-Month-Old Infants
Language acquisition presents a formidable task for infants, for whom word learning is a crucial yet challenging step. Syntax (the rules for combining words into sentences) has been robustly shown to be a cue to word meaning. But how can infants access syntactic information when they are still acquiring the meanings of words? We investigated the contribution of two cues that may help infants break into the syntax and give a boost to their lexical…
Bootstrapping lexical and syntactic acquisition
How does language acquisition start? Having access to words and their meaning should help infants to learn about syntax, but learning about word meaning would be facilitated if infants had access to syntactic structure ( Gleitman 1990 ). Phrasal prosody and function words may bootstrap lexical and syntactic acquisition. Infants have access to phonological phrases, and they use these to constrain the syntactic analysis of utterances by 18 months. …
Early perception of phrasal prosody and its role in syntactic and lexical acquisition
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 crucial aspects of phrasal prosody before the end of their first year of life, and that a few months late…
Year-Old Children Rapidly Adapt Their Predictions and Use Them to Learn Novel Word Meanings
Adults create and update predictions about what speakers will say next. The current study asks whether prediction can drive language acquisition, by testing whether 3-4-year-old children (n=45) adapt to recent information when learning novel words. The study used a syntactic context which can precede both nouns and verbs to manipulate children’s predictions about what syntactic category will follow. Children for whom the syntactic context predict…
Three- to Four-Year-Old Children Rapidly Adapt Their Predictions and Use Them to Learn Novel Word Meanings
Adults create and update predictions about what speakers will say next. This study asks whether prediction can drive language acquisition, by testing whether 3- to 4-year-old children (n = 45) adapt to recent information when learning novel words. The study used a syntactic context which can precede both nouns and verbs to manipulate children's predictions about what syntactic category will follow. Children for whom the syntactic context predicte…
"Look up!" Using easy words to explain how we learn hard words and other aspects of language, an interview with Lila Gleitman
Lila Gleitman is undoubtedly one of the world's foremost experts on language acquisition and developmental psycholinguistics. Starting in the 60s, she rose to prominence by bringing experimental methods from psychology to bear on the questions raised by linguistics and philosophers of language, namely how children could learn the rules of a language when there is so much ambiguity both in the language and in the world surrounding them. She has do…
Scalar Implicatures
Scalar implicatures, the phenomena where a sentence like “The pianist played some Mozart sonatas” is interpreted as “The pianist did not play all Mozart sonatas” have been given two different analyses. Neo-Griceans claim that this interpretation is based on lexical scales (e.g. ), where the stronger term (e.g. all) implies the weaker term (e.g. some), but the weaker term (e.g., some) implicates the negation of the stronger term (i.e., some = not …
Preschoolers use phrasal prosody online to constrain syntactic analysis
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 fenêtre] 'the little girl closes the window'--brackets indicate prosodic boundaries). Although these…
Syntactic Prediction Adaptation Accounts for Language Processing and Language Learning
A previous study has shown that children use recent input to adapt their syntactic predictions and use these adapted predictions to infer the meaning of novel words. In the current study, we investigated whether children could use this mechanism to disambiguate words whose interpretation as a noun or a verb is ambiguous. We tested 2- to 4-year-old French children using the phrase la petite followed by a homophone that could be interpreted as eith…
Preschoolers use phrasal prosody online to constrain syntactic analysis
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 fenêtre] 'the little girl closes the window'--brackets indicate prosodic boundaries). Although these…
Scalar Implicatures
Scalar implicatures, the phenomena where a sentence like “The pianist played some Mozart sonatas” is interpreted as “The pianist did not play all Mozart sonatas” have been given two different analyses. Neo-Griceans claim that this interpretation is based on lexical scales (e.g. ), where the stronger term (e.g. all) implies the weaker term (e.g. some), but the weaker term (e.g., some) implicates the negation of the stronger term (i.e., some = not …
Bootstrapping lexical and syntactic acquisition
How does language acquisition start? Having access to words and their meaning should help infants to learn about syntax, but learning about word meaning would be facilitated if infants had access to syntactic structure ( Gleitman 1990 ). Phrasal prosody and function words may bootstrap lexical and syntactic acquisition. Infants have access to phonological phrases, and they use these to constrain the syntactic analysis of utterances by 18 months. …
Early perception of phrasal prosody and its role in syntactic and lexical acquisition
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 crucial aspects of phrasal prosody before the end of their first year of life, and that a few months late…
Year-Old Children Rapidly Adapt Their Predictions and Use Them to Learn Novel Word Meanings
Adults create and update predictions about what speakers will say next. The current study asks whether prediction can drive language acquisition, by testing whether 3-4-year-old children (n=45) adapt to recent information when learning novel words. The study used a syntactic context which can precede both nouns and verbs to manipulate children’s predictions about what syntactic category will follow. Children for whom the syntactic context predict…
Three- to Four-Year-Old Children Rapidly Adapt Their Predictions and Use Them to Learn Novel Word Meanings
Adults create and update predictions about what speakers will say next. This study asks whether prediction can drive language acquisition, by testing whether 3- to 4-year-old children (n = 45) adapt to recent information when learning novel words. The study used a syntactic context which can precede both nouns and verbs to manipulate children's predictions about what syntactic category will follow. Children for whom the syntactic context predicte…
"Look up!" Using easy words to explain how we learn hard words and other aspects of language, an interview with Lila Gleitman
Lila Gleitman is undoubtedly one of the world's foremost experts on language acquisition and developmental psycholinguistics. Starting in the 60s, she rose to prominence by bringing experimental methods from psychology to bear on the questions raised by linguistics and philosophers of language, namely how children could learn the rules of a language when there is so much ambiguity both in the language and in the world surrounding them. She has do…
Studying the Real-Time Interpretation of Novel Noun and Verb Meanings in Young Children
Decades of research show that children rely on the linguistic context in which novel words occur to infer their meanings. However, because learning in these studies was assessed after children had heard numerous occurrences of a novel word in informative linguistic contexts, it is impossible to determine how much exposure would be needed for a child to learn from such information. This study investigated the speed with which French 20-month-olds …
Prosody and Function Words Cue the Acquisition of Word Meanings in 18-Month-Old Infants
Language acquisition presents a formidable task for infants, for whom word learning is a crucial yet challenging step. Syntax (the rules for combining words into sentences) has been robustly shown to be a cue to word meaning. But how can infants access syntactic information when they are still acquiring the meanings of words? We investigated the contribution of two cues that may help infants break into the syntax and give a boost to their lexical…
Familiar words can serve as a semantic seed for syntactic bootstrapping
Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. But how do they learn which contexts are linked to which semantic features in the first place? We investigate if 3- to 4-year-old children (n = 60) can learn about a syntactic context from tracking its use with only a few familiar words. After watching a 5-min training video in which a novel function word (i.e., 'ko') replaced either personal pro…
“The tiger is hitting! the duck too!” 3-year-olds can use prosodic information to constrain their interpretation of ellipsis
Syntactic prediction adaptation accounts for language processing and language learning
Previous literature has shown that children use recent input to adapt their syntactic predictions, and use these adapted predictions to infer the meaning of novel words. The current study tested whether they could use this mechanism to disambiguate words that are ambiguous between a noun and a verbinterpretation. We tested two-to-four-year-old French children using the phrase la petite followed by a homophone that could be interpreted as either a…
Covid-19 first lockdown as a window into language acquisition
The COVID-19 pandemic, and the resulting closure of daycare centers worldwide, led to unprecedented changes in children’s learning environments. This period of increased time at home with caregivers, with limited access to external sources (e.g., daycares) provides a unique opportunity to examine the associations between the caregiver-child activities and children’s language development. The vocabularies of 1742 children aged 8-36 months across 1…
“ Look! It is not a bamoule! ”
Two word-learning experiments were conducted to investigate the understanding of negative sentences in 18- and 24-month-old children. In Experiment 1, after learning that bamoule means "penguin" and pirdaling means "cartwheeling," 18-month-olds (n = 48) increased their looking times when listening to negative sentences rendered false by their visual context ("Look! It is not a bamoule!" while watching a video showing a penguin cartwheeling); howe…
Syntactic Prediction Adaptation Accounts for Language Processing and Language Learning
A previous study has shown that children use recent input to adapt their syntactic predictions and use these adapted predictions to infer the meaning of novel words. In the current study, we investigated whether children could use this mechanism to disambiguate words whose interpretation as a noun or a verb is ambiguous. We tested 2- to 4-year-old French children using the phrase la petite followed by a homophone that could be interpreted as eith…
Learning to predict and predicting to learn
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 the semantic predictiveness of syntactic contexts by tracking thedistribution of familiar words. We p…
Learning to predict and predicting to learn
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 discover the semantic predictiveness of syntactic contexts by tracking the distribution of familiar words.…
English-learning preschoolers can correctly parse and interpret negative sentences to guide their interpretations of novel noun and verb meanings
We studied English-learning children’s ability to learn the meanings of novel words from sentences containing truth-functional negation (Exp1) and to use the semantics of negation to inform word meaning (Exp2). In Exp1, 22-month-olds (n = 21) heard dialogues introducing a novel verb in either negative-transitive (“Mary didn’t blick the baby”) or negative-intransitive (“Mary didn’t blick”) sentences. When then asked to “Find blicking!” while viewi…
There might be more to syntactic bootstrapping than being pragmatic
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 particularly impoverished as the sole basis for deriving meanings, and thus where linguistic cues may be partic…
Month-Olds Can Use Negative Evidence While Learning Word Meanings
Decades of research in psychology have built models and theoretical assumptions about language development evaluating how children extract information from positive evidence to learn the meanings of novel words. In the present set of studies, we evaluated whether children can also consider negative evidence, information about what a word cannot refer to. Across two experiments (n = 73), we show that English-learning 20-month-olds can use negative…
Brazilian-Portuguese-learning preschoolers use phrasal prosody to constrain their interpretation of ellipsis
Formação de médicos para atenção à saúde da comunidade lésbica, gay, bissexual e transgênero
Introdução: A discussão acerca do cuidado a saúde da população de Lésbicas, Gay, Bissexuais e Transgênero (LGBT) ainda se apresenta de forma insuficiente, no âmbito mundial e no Brasil. Este contexto pode ser atribuído, ao processo de formação de profissionais de saúde, que não são qualificados para o atendimento as demandas de saúde desta população. Objetivo: Verificar a configuração dos Projetos Político dos Cursos (PPCs) e Planos de Ensino (PE…
Cognitive Control Skills Are Related to Ambiguity Awareness in French‐Learning 5‐to‐6‐Year‐Olds
Five‐to‐six‐year‐olds’ abilities to detect and solve ambiguities in spoken language have been found to be a predictor of their later reading abilities in first‐to‐third grade. However, the origins of this relationship remain unclear. Success in ambiguity detection may be reflective of overall language attainment, which varies with socioeconomic status (SES) and is known to predict reading. Yet, it is also possible that children's ability to detec…
Executive functions as mediators between family socio-economic status and pre-academic abilities in early preschool children
Academic achievement in children is strongly shaped by their family’s socio-economic status (SES). Executive functions (EFs)—a set of high-level cognitive functions that enable individuals to set and achieve goals—may mediate this association. In a representative sample of 2,618 preschoolers (mean age = 42.61 ± 3.41 months; 1,254 girls), we found that EFs partly mediate the SES–pre-academic skills link. SES-related inequalities in numeracy and or…
“Really, he dased the doll to the girl?” Two-year-olds can exploit grammatical and thematic content to learn novel verb meanings
Infants exploit the syntactic context verbs appear in to guide verb learning: a mechanism known as syntactic bootstrapping . However, it remains unclear whether infants' bootstrapping representations are achieved by matching the number of nouns in a sentence to the number of participants in an event, or by exploiting a more specific mapping between syntactic positions and thematic roles. To investigate this, we tested toddlers' ability to learn t…
Language Development and Disorders (22 works) · Linguistics (21 works) · Psychology (21 works) · Reading and Literacy Development (18 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Artificial Intelligence (11 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (10 works) · Natural language processing (10 works) · Syntax (10 works) · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism (9 works)