Emmanuel Chemla

About

I am a researcher at CNRS, the French center for research (more on institutions). I primarily work in linguistics and psycholinguistics: using language is an every day achievement, and we want to understand this human capacity. The field of linguistics is composed of interacting subfields, such as phonology, morphology, syntax; I specialize in semantics and pragmatics: what are the elementary operations that we deploy to construct the meaning of a series of words? How do we manage to compute and combine these operations with no apparent effort? How do children come to master this complex system? What do other species do of this? How do machines perform?

On a daily basis, we develop formal models of this human system: we use tools from mathematics and computer science to emulate parts of this system. This is called formal semantics, and it inherits from the formal rigor of a century long tradition in philosophy and logic. We test the predictions of these simulations against what humans actually do in the relevant situations. This is psycholinguistics, and it offers numerous methods, from the collection of mere introspective judgments from native speakers, on a small or large scale, to the inspection of what requires what effort (processing time, even if by a couple of hundreds of milliseconds difference, disruption of linguistic abilities by non-linguistic tasks, brain activity, etc.).

Scientific results are evaluated through and distributed in scientific publications. The list of publications below and its informal list of keywords give an idea of what specific linguistic phenomena I have been interested in, and what connex domains beyond traditional linguistics I have worked on.

Mailing and physical address

E-mail

Getting to my office or to our usual meeting room

My office is in the "Pavillon Jardin" of ENS. This building hosts LSCP and IJN (see the section on my research environment).

• Go to 24 rue Lhommond (WARNING: not the mailing address)
• Follow the signs for Batiment Jaures: through the glass doors, then make a right after the front desk, out in the courtyard
• The Pavillon Jardin is in front of Batiment Jaures, so before you reach in Batiment Jaures, turn over and you will see the little building called Pavillon Jardin (see picture).
• Enter Pavillon Jardin, or ring me if the door is closed.
• Our most usual meeting room is right at the entrance of the building (to the left).
• My office (number 6) is on the corridor on the ground floor, a couple of doors to the right.

Part of this page, including the picture, was stolen from my colleague, her office is right next to mine.

Collaborators

Local research environment

My research environment creates unique opportunities to work with numerous people, on numerous questions, using numerous methods. But it is also complicated. Here is my attempt to describe it - still simplifying a bit, apologies.

Starting with a picture (I am the red dot)

Adding words

CNRS: is a national institute for research in France.
This is my direct employer. CNRS researchers do not work in a national center. We work in local, thematic labs, which for most of them are physically and administratively attached to universities. My lab (where I work on a daily basis) is hosted at ENS. My lab is co-affiliated with another university, EHESS, even though it is not physically there.

ENS: Ecole Normale Supérieure.
It is among the most selective universities in France.
It is structured in "Departments".

DEC: Cognitive Science Department at ENS.
Its education program and research are organized around a board of core members, the cogmaster program, and a group of CNRS labs physically and administratively hosted there.

Cogmaster: is a cognitive science master program, run by the DEC as well as by EHESS and Université Paris Descartes.

Core members of the DEC: The DEC is made of the members of its labs, but it also has some positions of its own. For instance, Maria Giavazzi and Salvador Mascarenhas are linguists (phonologist and semanticist) serving as Assistant Professors primarily appointed at the DEC level.

LSCP: Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique. This is my CNRS lab, I belong to the last of its four "teams" below:

- Brain and consciousness

- Cognitive development and pathology

- Computational mechanisms of cognitive development

- Language Team

IJN: Institut Jean-Nicod. I am co-affiliated with this other CNRS lab of DEC. It is the most philosophy oriented lab within our cognitive science department and it hosts many of our linguists, conveniently in the same building as LSCP.

LINGUAE: The DEC has structures cutting across labs. I am part of the LINGUAE group, a team of closely collaborating researchers working in language. This LINGUAE group is itself part of a broader group of linguists called "DEC linguistics".

Other CNRS labs are hosted at DEC, with active research using methods from philosophy, neuroscience, experimental psychology with infants, children and adults; studying perception (audition, vision), attention, decision making, consciousness, reasoning, language, emotions, action, social behavior...

Other departments in sciences and humanities together form ENS, which hosted or trained 10 Field medalists, 12 Nobel Prize Laureates...

PSL: Paris Sciences et Lettres is a fusion of universities in Paris.
It includes ENS and its DEC. Such a structure is called a COMUE, it benefits from a grant called an IDEX, delivered by the ANR, the national scientific funding agency.

ERC is a European research funding agency.
It is independent from the institutions above and offers grant schemes for specific research projects. My research is funded by a "Starting Grant" for the period 2013-2018. The name of the project is SEMEXP: "Psycho-semantics: new data for formal semantics models, stronger frameworks for experimental studies".

LSCP

Institut | Nicod

LINGUAE

• Getting the size of R graphs right for slides or papers in one basic step (legible legends, titles, etc.): here
• Stats. How evil is it to explore multiple thresholds for exclusion of outliers in a data set? here

  Simulations show that exploring 25 thresholds systematically does not dramatically increase the rate of false positives.

• Stats. Notes about appropriate graphical representations of mixed model analyses: here

  Averages may show an effect that's opposite of what a mixed model analysis argues for.

• A convenient way to type in Hebrew with a French or English keyboard: here