School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences

About: School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences is a facility organization based out in Villejuif, France. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Politics & Context (language use). The organization has 1230 authors who have published 2084 publications receiving 57740 citations. The organization is also known as: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales & EHESS.

Neurocognitive barriers to the embodiment of technology

Abstract: The increasing integration of wearable technologies with the human body raises neural and cognitive challenges and opportunities.

Language discrimination by newborns: Teasing apart phonotactic, rhythmic, and intonational cues

Abstract: Speech rhythm has long been claimed to be a useful bootstrapping cue in the very first steps of language acquisition. Previous studies have suggested that newborn infants do categorize varieties of speech rhythm, as demonstrated by their ability to discriminate between certain languages. However, the existing evidence is not unequivocal: in previous studies, stimuli discriminated by newborns always contained additional speech cues on top of rhythm. Here, we conducted a series of experiments assessing discrimination between Dutch and Japanese by newborn infants, using a speech resynthesis technique to progressively degrade non-rhythmical properties of the sentences. When the stimuli are resynthesized using identical phonemes and artificial intonation contours for the two languages, thereby preserving only their rhythmic and broad phonotactic structure, newborns still seem to be able to discriminate between the two languages, but the effect is weaker than when intonation is present. This leaves open the possibility that the temporal correlation between intonational and rhythmic cues might actually facilitate the processing of speech rhythm. Key-words: newborn speech perception language discrimination rhythm intonation prosody bootstrapping. Language acquisition is a field notorious for its bootstrapping problems: in essence, it seems impossible to explain how each component of language is learnt without appealing to previous knowledge of other components. How does the child learn syntax? By relying on his/her knowledge of words, their meaning, and the meaning of whole sentences, as revealed by observation (this is semantic bootstrapping; Pinker, 1984). But how does the child learn the meaning of words? You have to assume some notions of syntax (this is syntactic bootstrapping; Gleitman, 1990). These apparent paradoxes have raised interest in the study of the raw input available to the child, i.e., the speech signal, and of how much information can be extracted thereof. In this line, Gleitman and Wanner (1982) had already long ago suggested that prosody (rhythm, intonation) might play an important role in the acquisition of syntax (this was prosodic bootstrapping). Prosody has also been shown to be an impor

Agricultural Insurances Based on Meteorological Indices: Realizations, Methods and Research Agenda

Abstract: In many low-income countries, agriculture is mostly rain-fed and yields highly depend on climatic factors. Furthermore, farmers have little access to traditional crop insurance, which suffers from high information asymmetry and transaction costs. Insurances based on meteorological indices could fill this gap since they do not face such drawbacks. However their implementation has been slow so far. In this article, we first describe the most advanced projects that have taken place in developing countries using these types of crop insurances. We then describe the methodology that has been used to design such projects, in order to choose the meteorological index, the indemnity schedule and the insurance premium. We finally draw an agenda for research in economics on this topic. In particular, more research is needed on implementation issues, on the assessment of benefits, on the way to deal with climate change, on the spatial variability of weather and on the interactions with other hedging methods.

Beginnings of prosodic organization: intonation and duration patterns of disyllables produced by Japanese and French infants.

Abstract: In this study, some prosodic aspects of the disyllabic vocalizations (both babbling and words) produced by four French and four Japanese children of about 18 months of age, are examined. F0 contour and vowel durations in disyllables are found to be clearly language-specific. For French infants, rising F0 contours and final syllable lengthening are the rule, whereas falling F0 contours and absence of final lengthening are the rule for Japanese children. These results are congruent with adult prosody in the two languages. They hold for both babbling and utterances identified as words. The disyllables produced by the Japanese infants reflect adult forms not only in terms of global intonation patterns, but also in terms of tone and duration characteristics at the lexical level.