Anne Christophe

Dados Biográficos

ID1463592
NOMEAnne Christophe
PRENOMESAnne
SOBRENOMEChristophe
ASSINATURACHRISTOPHE A
AFILIAÇÕESLaboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (ENS, EHESS, CNRS) Département d'Études Cognitives (École Normale Supérieure – PSL Research University) Paris France
VERIFICADONão
TOTAL DE OBRAS34
TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES23
TOTAL COMO AUTOR34
TOTAL COMO EDITOR0
PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO1996
ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO2023
ÍNDICE H3

  • There might be more to syntactic bootstrapping than being pragmatic

    Open AccessNaomi Havron, Antônio De Carvalho et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2023

    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

    Mireille Babineau, Naomi Havron et al.PREPRINT2022

    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…

  • Preverbal infants’ sensitivity to grammatical dependencies

    Open AccessMireille Babineau, Anne Christophe et al.ARTICLEInfancy2022

    During their first months of life, infants can already distinguish function words (e.g., pronouns and determiners) from content words (e.g., verbs and nouns). Little research has explored preverbal infants' sensitivity to the relationships between these word categories. This preregistered study examines whether French‐learning 8‐ and 11‐month‐olds track the grammatical dependencies between determiners and nouns as well as pronouns and verbs. Usin…

  • “The tiger is hitting! the duck too!” 3-year-olds can use prosodic information to constrain their interpretation of ellipsis

    Open AccessLetícia Schiavon Kolberg, Letícia Kolberg et al.ARTICLECognition2021

  • Syntactic prediction adaptation accounts for language processing and language learning

    Naomi Havron, Mireille Babineau et al.PREPRINT2021

    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…

  • The Acquisition of Noun and Verb Categories by Bootstrapping From a Few Known Words

    Open AccessPerrine Brusini, Olga Seminck et al.ARTICLEFrontiers in Psychology2021

    While many studies have shown that toddlers are able to detect syntactic regularities in speech, the learning mechanism allowing them to do this is still largely unclear. In this article, we use computational modeling to assess the plausibility of a context-based learning mechanism for the acquisition of nouns and verbs. We hypothesize that infants can assign basic semantic features, such as “is-an-object” and/or “is-an-action,” to the very first…

  • Syntactic Prediction Adaptation Accounts for Language Processing and Language Learning

    Open AccessNaomi Havron, Mireille Babineau et al.ARTICLELanguage Learning2021Citada por: 4Referências: 31

    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…

  • Prosodic Bootstrapping

    Judit Gervain, Anne Christophe et al.CHAPTEROxford Handbook of Language Prosody2020

    This chapter covers theoretical frameworks and experimental findings showing that young infants are already sensitive to language prosody prenatally and can use it to learn about the lexical and morphosyntactic features of their native language(s). Specifically, the chapter first summarizes how prosody relates to the lexicon and the grammar in different languages. It then reviews empirical evidence about prosodic perception in infants. Subsequent…

  • Priming syntactic ambiguity resolution in children and adults

    Naomi Havron, Camila Scaff et al.PREPRINT2020

    Adults use their recent experience to disambiguate ambiguous sentences: Structures that haverecently been primed are favored in the resolution of different types of ambiguity, an example ofstructural priming. Research on children’s use of recent information for disambiguation is scarce.Using a forced-choice task with a tablet, we asked whether 5-6-year-old French-speakingchildren could also be primed in the resolution of attachment ambiguities, a…

  • Month-Olds Fail to Use Recent Experience to Infer the Syntactic Category of Novel Words

    Naomi Havron, Mireille Babineau et al.PREPRINT2020

    Infants are able to use the contexts in which familiar words appear to guide their inferences about the syntactic category of novel words (e.g., “This is a” + “dax” -> dax = object). The current study examined whether 18-month-old infants can rapidly adapt these expectations by tracking the distribution of syntactic structures in their input. In French, la petite can be followed by both nouns (la petite balle, “the little ball”) and verbs (la pet…

  • Year-Old Children Adapt to the Reliability of Conflicting Sources of Information to Learn Novel Words

    Marion Beretti, Naomi Havron et al.PREPRINT2020

    A central challenge in language acquisition is the integration of multiple sources of information, potentially in conflict, to acquire new knowledge and adjust current linguistic representations. One way to accomplish this is to assign more weight to more reliable sources of information in context. We test the hypothesis that children adjust the weight of different sources of information during learning, considering two specific sources of inform…

  • Month‐olds Exploit Verbs’ Syntactic Contexts to Build Expectations About Novel Words

    Open AccessMireille Babineau, Rushen Shi et al.ARTICLEInfancy2020

    During their second year of life, infants develop a rudimentary understanding of grammatical categories based on their knowledge and use of frequent function words. The current study inquired whether, at only 14 months of age, infants can track co‐occurrence patterns between function words and content words (e.g., determiners can precede nouns, and pronouns can precede verbs), and use these previously encountered syntactic contexts to build expec…

  • Studying the Real-Time Interpretation of Novel Noun and Verb Meanings in Young Children

    Open AccessAntônio De Carvalho, Alex De Carvalho et al.ARTICLEFrontiers in Psychology2019

    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 …

  • Bootstrapping lexical and syntactic acquisition

    Perrine Brusini, Antônio De Carvalho et al.CHAPTERSources of Variation in First…2018

    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

    Antônio De Carvalho, Alex De Carvalho et al.CHAPTERDevelopment of Prosody in First…2018

    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…

  • Three- to Four-Year-Old Children Rapidly Adapt Their Predictions and Use Them to Learn Novel Word Meanings

    Open AccessNaomi Havron, Antônio De Carvalho et al.ARTICLEChild Development2018

    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…

  • Processing Continuous Speech in Infancy

    Jeffrey Lidz, Louise Goyet et al.BOOKOxford Handbook of Developmental…2016

    The present chapter focuses on fluent speech segmentation abilities in early language development. We first review studies exploring the early use of major prosodic boundary cues which allow infants to cut full utterances into smaller-sized sequences like clauses or phrases. We then summarize studies showing that word segmentation abilities emerge around 8 months, and rely on infants’ processing of various bottom-up word boundary cues and top-dow…

  • Preschoolers use phrasal prosody online to constrain syntactic analysis

    Open AccessAntônio De Carvalho, Alex De Carvalho et al.ARTICLEDevelopmental Science2015

    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…

  • Infants' Acquisition of Grammatical Gender Dependencies

    Open AccessMarieke van Heugten, Anne Christophe et al.ARTICLEInfancy2015

    To successfully understand spoken language, listeners need to determine how words within sentences relate to one another. Although the ability to compute relationships between word categories is known to develop early in life, little research has been conducted on infants' early sensitivity to subcategorical dependencies, such as those evoked by grammatical gender (where the article form is dictated by the noun's gender). This study therefore exa…

  • Toddlers Default to Canonical Surface-to-Meaning Mapping When Learning Verbs

    Open AccessIsabelle Dautriche, Alejandrina Cristia et al.ARTICLEChild Development2013

    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 presence of clear, language-specific cues should block such a canonical mapping. Toddlers (N = 96) interp…

  • Phrasal prosody constrains word segmentation in French 16-month-olds

    Open AccessSéverine Millotte, James L Morgan et al.ARTICLEJournal of Portuguese Linguistics2011

    Infants who are in the process of acquiring their mother tongue have to find a way of segmenting the continuous speech stream into word-sized units. We present an experiment showing that French 16-month-olds are able to exploit phonological phrase boundaries in order to constrain lexical access. Using the conditioned head-turning technique, we showed that infants trained to turn their head for a bisyllabic word responded more often to sentences t…

  • Chapter 3. Early bootstrapping of syntactic acquisition

    Anne Christophe, Anne‐caroline Fiévet et al.CHAPTERLanguage acquisition across…2010

    Infants acquiring language have to learn about the lexicon, the phonology, and the syntax of their native language, among others. For each of these domains, being able to rely on knowledge from the other domains would simplify the learner’s task. For instance, having access to words and their meaning should help infants to learn about syntax, but learning about the meaning of words would be greatly facilitated if infants had access to some aspect…

  • The development of a phonological illusion

    Open AccessReiko Mazuka, Yvonne Cao et al.ARTICLEDevelopmental Science2010

    In adults, native language phonology has strong perceptual effects. Previous work has shown that Japanese speakers, unlike French speakers, break up illegal sequences of consonants with illusory vowels: they report hearing abna as abuna. To study the development of phonological grammar, we compared Japanese and French infants in a discrimination task. In Experiment 1, we observed that 14-month-old Japanese infants, in contrast to French infants, …

  • À la découverte des mots

    Open AccessSéverine Millotte, Anne Christophe et al.ARTICLEEnfance2009

    Les enfants qui acquièrent leur langue maternelle doivent apprendre, entre autres choses, les mots de cette langue. Pour ce faire, ils doivent d’une part extraire la forme sonore des mots donc segmenter la parole continue. Nous verrons dans une première partie que les informations prosodiques sont utilisées par les jeunes enfants pour trouver où commencent et où finissent les mots dans les phrases. D’autre part, les enfants doivent ensuite réussi…

  • Bootstrapping Lexical and Syntactic Acquisition

    Open AccessAnne Christophe, Anne‐caroline Fiévet et al.ARTICLELanguage and Speech2008Citada por: 9Referências: 39

    This paper focuses on how phrasal prosody and function words may interact during early language acquisition. Experimental results show that infants have access to intermediate prosodic phrases (phonological phrases) during the first year of life, and use these to constrain lexical segmentation. These same intermediate prosodic phrases are used by adults to constrain on-line syntactic analysis. In addition, by two years of age infants can exploit …