Alex de Carvalho

Alex de Carvalho is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the Université Paris Cité and he develops his research at the Laboratoire de Psychologie du Développement et de l'Éducation de l'enfant (LaPsyDÉ - UMR CNRS 8240). Alex received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Sciences from the École Normale Supérieure, Paris ? France where he worked under the supervision of Anne Christophe at the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique. After his PhD, Alex worked as postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania with John Trueswell. Alex de Carvalho was awarded a master's degree by the Cogmaster (Graduate Program of excellence in the training of researchers in Cognitive Sciences), a diploma co-qualified between the École Normale Supérieure (ENS, Ulm) - Université Paris Cité (Paris Descartes - Sorbonne) and the École d'Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). Alex holds a specialization degree in Psycholinguistics from ENS-Lyon as well. Alex graduated from Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) in letters: Portuguese-French. In 2015, Alex de Carvalho received the Society for Language Development student award in recognition of his accomplishments in the field and his strong investment in interdisciplinary research. Alex de Carvalho is particularly interested in identifying the mechanisms that young children can use to learn the syntax of their native language and to develop their vocabulary. Decades of research have demonstrated the importance of syntax (the rules for combining words into sentences) as a cue to learn word meaning. But how can children access such abstract structure without first knowing the meanings of the words? In my research to date, I have studied this question by investigating the role of phrasal prosody and function words, two sources of information that are available early during language acquisition and convey useful information about syntactic structure. I demonstrated that preschoolers can use phrasal prosody online to constrain their syntactic analysis of ambiguous words in French. For instance, if they listen to a sentence such as ?[Tu vois la petite marche?] ? Do you see the little stair?, they interpret ?marche? as a noun, but in a sentence such as [Tu vois?] [la petite] [marche]! ? Do you see? The little girl walks!, they interpret ?marche? as a verb (de Carvalho et al., 2016 DevSci). I demonstrated that this ability is also present in English and in Brazilian Portuguese with sentences such as ?Do you see the baby flies? in which preschoolers can use prosodic information to decide whether ?flies? is a noun or a verb (de Carvalho et al., 2016 JASA; 2022 Speech Prosody) and importantly I also showed that even infants around 20-month-old, who are still in the process of learning their language, can use phrasal prosody to recover the syntactic structure of sentences and to predict the syntactic category of upcoming words, an ability which would be extremely useful to discover the meaning of novel words (de Carvalho et al., 2017 Cognition; 2021 JECP). In a recent paper I directly demonstrated the plausibility of this hypothesis showing for the first time that 18-month-old infants use prosody to recover sentences? syntactic structure, which in turn constrains the possible meaning of novel words: participants listening to a sentence such as ?[Do you see the baby blicks]?? interpreted the novel word ?blicks? as referring to objects, but when listening to a sentence such as ?[Do you see]? [the baby] [blicks]!?, they interpreted the novel word as referring to an action (de Carvalho, He, Lidz & Christophe, 2019 Psychological Science). Moreover, I also developed other lines of research studying the impact of pragmatics (de Carvalho, et al. 2016 Frontiers in Psychology) and negative sentences in the interpretation of word meanings (de Carvalho, Trueswell, Barrault, Crimon & Christophe, 2021 Developmental Science).