Maureen de Seyssel

Docteurs récents

Thèse

Titre : Does multilingual input help or hinder early language acquisition? A computational modelling approach.

Date de soutenance : 2023-11-27

Inscription : 2020 à École normale Supérieure

Résumé :

Experimental studies in bilingual language acquisition are based on the assumption that children separate languages at birth or within months, and that this early ability is essential for successful learning. This would prevent children from mixing languages and learning a multilingual representation that does not correspond to any specific language. This project will test this hypothesis following a reverse-engineering approach by using computational models, which aim to model the ideal learner when faced with input data whose number of languages is a priori unknown. This approach will directly test two aspects of the hypothesis : (1) the premise that it is possible to separate languages before learning them, and (2) the justification that separation is necessary for learning several languages in parallel.