Marvin Lavechin has recently joined CNRS as chargé de recherche at the Laboratoire d’Informatique et Systèmes (LIS) in Marseille. He completed his PhD at Meta AI and the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (ENS, Paris), followed by postdocs at GIPSA-lab (Grenoble), and then at the Computational Psycholinguistics Lab (MIT) and the Bergelson Lab (Harvard), funded by the Simons Center for the Social Brain.
His research sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence and cognitive science. Marvin seeks to understand how children learn to speak and perceive language, and to reproduce this process in machines. He develops automatic tools to analyze what children hear and vocally produce in their daily lives (see, for example, BabAR). Marvin also designs computational models that “learn” language the way an infant would, from raw sounds, without predefined labels or categories, in order to better identify the mechanisms that make this acquisition possible.
This research has both fundamental and practical implications: better understanding language acquisition can improve early screening for developmental disorders, while also opening new avenues for designing more efficient artificial intelligence.