Laboratory for the Psychology

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Alex de Carvalho

Alex de Carvalho is an Associate Professor of Developmental Psychology at University of Paris (Université Paris Descartes). He received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Sciences from the École Normale Supérieure, where he worked with Anne Christophe. After completing his Ph.D, Alex worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the department of psychology at University of Pennsylvania, with John Trueswell. Alex’s research explore many facets of language development, comprehension, production and representation and their relationship to other non-linguistic aspects of cognitive development as well as children’s ability to read.

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Some of the fundamental questions Alex de Carvalho is interested in include:

  • What are the mechanisms that young children use to learn the meaning of words?

  • How do children and adults detect and solve ambiguities during language processing?

  • How do listeners adjust their reliance on different sources of information during sentence processing? Can they be encouraged to deal flexibly with the input?

  • What kind of cognitive abilities sustain language processing and language development and the ability to read?

  • How well does a child’s ability to understand and mentally analyze spoken sentences relate to the child’s ability to read sentences ?

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In his work, Alex employs a multidisciplinary approach, spanning the fields of education, developmental psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics. He uses a variety of methods (including eye tracking, Electroencephalography - EEG, language production tasks, and assessments of executive function skills) to investigate how spoken language processing skills are acquired and developed from infancy into adulthood.

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Contact : alex.de-carvalho@u-paris.fr

PUBLICATIONS

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Personal website : http://www.lscp.net/persons/decarvalho/

In press

Babineau, M., de Carvalho, A., Trueswell, J., & Christophe, A. (in press). Familiar words can serve as a semantic seed for syntactic bootstrapping. Developmental Science.

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2019

de Carvalho, A., He, A. X., Lidz, J. & Christophe, A. (2019). Prosody and function words cue the acquisition of word meanings in 18-month-old infants. Psychological Science, (January, 22), 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797618814131

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de Carvalho, A., Babineau, M., Trueswell, J. C., Waxman, S. R., & Christophe, A. (2019). Studying the Real-Time Interpretation of Novel Noun and Verb Meanings in Young Children. Frontiers in Psychology, 10:274(February), 1–16. http://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00274

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Havron, N., de Carvalho, A., Fiévet, A-C, & Christophe, A. (2019). 3-4-year-old children rapidly adapt their predictions and use them to learn novel word meanings. Child Development, 90(1), 82–90. http://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13113

 

2018

de Carvalho, A., Dautriche, I., Millotte, S., & Christophe, A. (2018). Early perception of phrasal prosody and its role in syntactic and lexical acquisition. In P. Prieto, N. Esteve-Gibert. Prosodic Development in First Language Acquisition. John Benjamins (TILAR Series), 17-35. https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.23.02car

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Brusini, P., de Carvalho, A., Dautriche, I., Gutman, A., Cauvet, E., Millotte, S. & Christophe, A. (2018) Bootstrapping lexical and syntactic acquisition. In M. Kail, M. Hickman & E. Veneziano, Sources of variations in first language acquisition: Languages, contexts, and learners. Trends in Language Acquisition Research, John Benjamins, 22, pp. 63-80. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2016.08.015

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2017

de Carvalho, A., Dautriche, I., Lin, I., & Christophe, A. (2017). Phrasal prosody constrains syntactic analysis in toddlers. Cognition, 163(6), 67-79.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2017.02.018

 

Brusini, Dehaene-Lambertz, van Heugten, de Carvalho, Goffinet, Fiévet, & Christophe (2017). Ambiguous function words do not prevent 18-month-olds from building accurate syntactic category expectations: An ERP study. Neuropsychologia, 98, 4-12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2016.08.015

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2016

de Carvalho, A., Dautriche, I., Christophe, A. (2016). Preschoolers use phrasal prosody online to constrain syntactic analysis. Developmental Science, 19(2), 235-250. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12300

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de Carvalho, A.*, Reboul, A.*, Van der Henst, J-B., Chelyus, A., Nazir, T. (2016). Scalar Implicatures: The Psychological Reality of Scales. Frontiers in Psychology. 7:1500. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01500

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de Carvalho, A., Lidz, J., Tieu, L., Bleam, T., & Christophe, A. (2016). English-speaking preschoolers can use phrasal prosody for syntactic parsing. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 139(6), EL216-EL222. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.4954385