SASC project

This page contains information about my work on the topic of Synergies in the Acquisition of Syntactic Categories (SASC).

This line of research was initially funded by a postdoc fellowship from the Fondation Fyssen (starting date: 10/2016). The SASC project described below is currently being funded by an ERC Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship (Grant number 799380, 09/2018-12/2020).

Abstract

From a very young age, children can infer the probable meaning of a new word from its syntactic context (syntactic bootstrapping; e.g., she blicks –>blick is an action/verb). What is the learning mechanism that enables this link from specific syntactic contexts to different semantic categories? This project investigates the influence exerted by the content words already present in the mental lexicon (i.e., the semantic seed) along with children’s distributional learning skills.

In the first line of research, I investigate how preverbal infants can use known words (i.e. semantic seed) to help them categorize a new word as a noun or a verb. The set of studies will measure if infants can build expectations about novel words based on the syntactic contexts in which they appear, and whether they can adapt to recent distributions.

In the second line of research, young children will be taught novel syntactic contexts (e.g., a new article) along with words they already know (semantic seed) to test if they can subsequently predict the meaning of a novel word that would appear in the same contexts (e.g., object). Inspection of cross-linguistic universals reveals that across the world’s languages, certain conceptual categories are often marked in morphosyntax (eg. object/action, animate/inanimate), while others not (e.g. colors). The cause of the regularities might thus be that since morphosyntax helps infants to learn word meanings, only those morphosyntactic regularities that mark conceptual distinctions that are noticeable by infants would be selected for human languages (i.e. core knowledge). In order to test this proposal, I will compare children's ability to learn a syntactic marker cueing a core knowledge distinction (i.e. animacy) vs. a non-core knowledge distinction.

Taken together, these studies aim at offering experimental support to theoretical frameworks of how language learning gets off the ground by relying on synergies between lexical and syntactic acquisition. This project will also give us insight on the type of distinctions that infants and adults find easy to associate with morphosyntactic markers, which would help us understand better how our minds have shaped the world's languages.

Publications linked to the project

Babineau, M., Fiévet, A.-C., & Christophe, A. (in press). Synergies in early syntactic and semantic acquisition: 11-month-olds can build syntactic expectations about newly learned nouns.

Barbir, M., Babineau, M., Fiévet, A.-C., & Christophe, A. (2023). Rapid Infant Learning of Syntactic-Semantic Links. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2209153119

Babineau*, M., Havron*, N., Dautriche, I., de Carvalho, A., & Christophe, A. (2022). Learning to predict and predicting to learn: Before and beyond the syntactic bootstrapper. Language Acquisition https://doi.org/10.1080/10489223.2022.2078211

Babineau, M., & Christophe, A. (2022). Preverbal infants' sensitivity to grammatical dependencies. Infancy, 27 (4), 648-662. http://doi.org/10.1111/infa.12466

Havron, N.*, Babineau*, M., & Christophe, A. (2021). 18-month-olds fail to use recent experience to infer the syntactic category of novel words. Developmental Science. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13030

Babineau, M., de Carvalho, A., Trueswell, J., & Christophe, A. (2021). Familiar words can serve as a semantic seed for syntactic bootstrapping. Developmental Science, 24, e13010. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13010

Babineau, M., Shi, R., & Christophe, A. (2020). 14-month-olds exploit verbs’ syntactic contexts to build expectations about novel words. Infancy, 25 (5), 719-733. https://doi.org/10.1111/infa.12354

de Carvalho, A., Babineau, M., Trueswell, J., Waxman, S., & Christophe, A. (2019). Studying the real-time interpretation of novel noun and verb meanings in young children. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 274. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00274

Talks at international conferences

Babineau, M., & Christophe, A. (2019, November). Preverbal infants' sensitivity to grammatical dependencies. Oral presentation at the Boston University Conference on Language Development. Boston, USA.

Babineau, M., Havron, N., & Christophe, A. (2019, March). Infants rapidly learn syntactic contexts and use them to acquire the meaning of novel words. Symposium presented at the International Convention of Psychological Science. Paris, France.

Babineau, M., de Carvalho, A., Trueswell, J., & Christophe, A. (2018, November). Bootstrapping syntactic acquisition with a semantic seed. Oral presentation at the Boston University Conference on Language Development. Boston, USA.

Barbir, M., Babineau, M., Fiévet, A.-C., & Christophe, A. (2018, November). French-learning infants use novel syntactic contexts to acquire the meanings of novel content words. Oral presentation at the Boston University Conference on Language Development. Boston, USA.

Posters presented at international conferences

Babineau, M., Christophe, A., & Shi, R. (2017, November). Semantic seed bootstraps verb categorization in 14-month-olds. Poster presented at the Boston University Conference on Language Development. Boston, USA.

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