ISLI project

Even before we start to speak, humans are endowed with a capacity for language which enables us to learn to speak quickly in the face of impoverished input. Ultimately, this linguistic capacity allows us to communicate with others and to understand and solve complex problems.  The Integrating Social reasoning and Logical reasoning in Infancy project (ISLI; 2021-2023) aims to study some foundations of this linguistic capacity by exploring the logical and social reasoning abilities of pre-verbal infants and their links to adult competence. The ISLI project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme in the form of a Widening Fellowship for Rachel Dudley at the Cognitive Development Center & Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University, under the guidance of Ágnes Kovács and Ernő Téglás.

project overview

In order to navigate the world, we need to reason about that which we do not directly observe, such as possible but non-actual outcomes or the intangible mental states of others. However, the development of these reasoning abilities is not well understood. This project aims to study the representations and processes that underlie infant reasoning and their similarity to those that underlie adult reasoning. Ultimately, these findings will provide insight into the extent of infants' early reasoning abilities and how they are linked to later language development. 

lines of research and output

The elimination of possibilities via negation 

Dudley, R., Kovács, Á. M., & Téglás, E. (2023). "12-month-olds' reasoning via negation." Paper published in Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 45. 

Attribution of beliefs 

Dudley, R., & Vogel, C. A. (2024). "Knowledge, the concept KNOW, and the word know: considerations from polysemy and pragmatics." Synthese 203, 17.

Linguistic encoding of relations

Dudley, R., Kovács, Á. M., & Téglás, E. (2023). "Testing the Syntax-Semantics Mapping for the Hungarian Inessive in Infancy via Reversible Participant Relations." Proceedings of the 47th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, 227-240.