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On distingue typiquement les présuppositions des assertions sur base de la théorie de Stalnaker (2002) concernant le terrain commun conversationnel. Les présuppositions sont typiquement données dans la conversation, contrairement aux assertions qui constituent des nouvelles informations. Mais les déclencheurs de présuppositions peuvent aussi être utilisées pour introduire des nouvelles informations. Plusieurs études montrent que de telles présuppositions dites informatives peuvent avoir une influence considérable sur la mémoire et les croyances, mais des comparaisons systématiques n’avaient jusqu’à présent jamais été faites. Nous avons examiné la question dans une série de trois études. La première présentait aux participant-e-s une histoire courte dans laquelle étaient variées les manières de présenter les informations. Des informations ciblées étaient présupposées, assertées, présentées dans une implicature de pertinence ou dans une implicature conventionnelle. Après la lecture, les participant-e-s répondaient à des questions de reconnaissance (Exp. 1.1 & 1.2) ou à des questions de reconnaissances verbatim (Exp. 1.3). Il n’y avait pas de différence significative entre les manières de présenter l’information en termes de mémoire. Par la suite, nous avons prévenu les participant-e-s que certaines informations étaient fausses, marquées en rouge. Nous avons alors testé leur mémoire de reconnaissance (Exp. 1.4) et leur mémoire explicite pour la valeur de vérité de l’information (Exp. 1.5). Nous n’avons de nouveau pas trouvé de différence entre les formes. Dans l’Etude 2, nous avons utilisé le paradigme typique des études de désinformation. Les participant-e-s ont regardé une vidéo avant de lire une description de la vidéo dans laquelle étaient modifiés dix détails. Nous avons alors testé leur mémoire. Les souvenirs des participant-e-s étaient modifiés par la description erronée, quelle que soit la forme dans laquelle la désinformation était présentée. Notre troisième e, Doctorat en Langues, lettres et traductologie, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This thesis provides a morphosyntactic description of Gizey, a languoid of the Masa branch of Chadic (Afroasiatic). Gizey is spoken primarily in Northern Cameroon and Southern Chad. Based mainly on narrative texts and elicited material, I describe various grammatical structural units and the way these encode morphosyntactic categories. I show that morphosyntactic categories are expressed chiefly via analytical means or agreement, and that morphological marking is only utilised minimally. Other features of particular interest include consonant-tone interaction and how it splits verbs into different inflectional classes; the presence of frozen reduplicatives, some of which are derived via analogical reduplication; and the contrastive use of two pronoun sets to mark logophoric and antilogophoric reference. In this thesis, I also use a comparative approach to make various diachronic generalisations about Masa languages, thus making a significant contribution to the embryonic fields of Masa and Chadic comparative studies., Cette thèse fournit une description de la morphosyntaxe du gizey, un parler de la branche masa des langues tchadiques (afro-asiatiques). Le gizey est parlé principalement dans le nord du Cameroun et le sud du Tchad.En partant d’un corpus constitué principalement de textes narratifs et des données élicitées, je décris différentes structures grammaticales et leurs modalités de marquage des catégories morphosyntaxiques. Je démontre que les catégories morphosyntaxiques sont surtout exprimées de manière analytique ou via l’accord. Je démontre aussi que le marquage morphologique n’est que très peu usité. D’autres caractéristiques notables sont l’interaction entre consonne et ton et son importance pour la détermination des classes verbales, la présence de la réduplication figée avec notamment la réduplication par analogie et l’utilisation contrastée de deux séries de pronoms pour marquer la logophoricité et l’antilogophoricité.Dans cette thèse, j’adopte en outre une approche comparative pour avancer des hypothèses diachroniques concernant les langues de la branche masa. En cela, ma thèse constitue un apport considérable pour les études comparatives des langues masa et tchadiques, un domaine de recherche encore embryonnaire., Doctorat en Langues, lettres et traductologie, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Social attention is reported to be crucial for the development of social skills, and, according to the social cognitive developmental theory, is fostered by social interactions. Autism is of central importance to the study of social attention, as autism is characterized by atypical social interactions and low social attention, both linked according to the social motivation theory to diminished social interest. Much evidence for positing low social interest in autism comes from eye-tracking studies, which, however, lack ecological validity. Our study documents social attention and physiological arousal, within close to real-life settings, in autistic children, as well as in their neurotypical peers, matched on gender and mental or chronological age. To explore the potential influence of partner familiarity or of the conversational topic, children gaze and electrodermal activity were recorded while they engaged in watercolor activities with, first a familiar and, next, an unfamiliar adult experimenter, who both introduced various topics. Autistic and neurotypical children exhibited comparable attention to their partners’ eyes. Notably, across all groups, heightened visual attention was directed to familiar rather than unfamiliar partners. Moreover, parallel arousal patterns emerged, with all children displaying increased skin conductance responses during more engaging topics and when looking at their interactional partner’s eyes. These findings underscore the task- and context-dependent nature of social attention and highlight the role of familiarity in an ecologically valid context. The absence of group differences challenges the universality of the social cognitive developmental theory and questions the scope of the social motivation theory of autism., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Background: Face scanning studies in autistic children report mixed results as to attention allocated to the eyes and mouth regions. While face scanning is a dynamic process, the way autistic children distribute their attention between the eyes and mouth of their interlocutor is usuallyanalyzed by averaging the proportion of time spent looking either on the eyes or the mouth over the whole duration of stimulus presentation.Method: In this study, instead, we focused on the temporal distribution of visual attention between the eyes and mouth of adult faces in 58 autistic and 61 typically developing (TD) children. Participants’ eye movements were recorded as they were freely watching videos of faces of silent and speaking adults. We explored attention to the eyes and mouth with fine-grained analyses of the temporal trajectory of fixations on the two regions using generalized additive mixed effects models.Results: These analyses revealed that both groups started their observation of speaking faces on the eyes and shifted to the mouth as the actor started speaking. However, TD, but not autistic children then slowly shifted their attention back to the eyes. Conclusions: Rigorous analyses of how autistic children modulate their visual attention between key social features of the face over time may provide more accurate descriptions of their face scanning abilities., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

More and more studies show that neurotype mismatching (e.g. autistic-non-autistic pairing) rather than being autistic leads to interaction difficulties in autism. This study further tests this assumption by investigating communication efficiency and first impressions of verbal interactions across three dyad types (autistic, non-autistic and mixed (autistic-non-autistic) dyads). To address this aim, we used an online version of the Director Task (DT) - a task in which dyads need to organize unlexicalized images in a specific order across several turns. To do so, they need to create novel referential expressions for these images. Dyad members communicate about these images across several rounds, prompting them to negotiate shorter descriptions and therefore taking less time to complete a round. The DT thus provides objective measures of conversation outcome which can then be related to more subjective measures (ratings). Following the DT, dyads engaged in an unstructured, get-to-know-you task. Afterwards, they rated each other’s discourse abilities (coherence, fluidity & efficiency), interaction quality and likelihood to hang out. Preliminary results from fifty-two dyads (23 non-autistic dyads/16 autistic dyads/12 mixed dyads) indicate that turn duration and expression length decreased for all dyad types, suggesting that all dyads became increasingly efficient as the task proceeded. Furthermore, during the DT, perceived discourse coherence, fluidity & efficiency did not differ across dyads. However, during the get-to-know-you task, in non-autistic dyads, ratings of coherence and fluidity were higher than in autistic and mixed dyads. Finally, in mixed dyads, ratings of likelihood to hang out were lower than those in same-neurotype dyads. These results suggest that neurotype mismatching does not influence impressions of the discourse and interaction quality but does seem to influence future behavioural intentions (e.g. likelihood to hang out). This study will help us be, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Language profiles in autism are variable and atypical, with frequent speech onset delays, but also, in some cases, unusually steep growth of structural language skills. Joint attention is often seen as a major predictor of language in autism, even though low joint attention is a core characteristic of autism, independent of language levels. In this systematic review of 71 studies, we ask whether, in autism, joint attention predicts advanced or only early language skills, and whether it may be independent of language outcomes. We consider only conservative estimates, and flag studies that include heterogenous samples or no control for non-verbal cognition. Our review suggests that joint attention plays a pivotal role for the emergence of language, but is also consistent with the idea that some autistic children may acquire language independently of joint attention skills. We propose that language in autism should not necessarily be modelled as a quantitative or chronological deviation from typical language development, and outline directions to bring autistic individuals’ atypicality within the focus of scientific inquiry., SCOPUS: re.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

A highly emblematic paradigm in experimental pragmatics consists in presenting participants with an existentially quantified sentence of the form Some X are Y in a context in which all X are obviously Y. Participants who reject such sentences as false or infelicitous are said to adopt a ‘pragmatic' instead of a ‘logical' reading of some, and to derive the scalar implicature Some, but not all X are Y. Although there are several competing accounts of scalar implicatures, virtually all of them assume that a participant who responds pragmatically to an under-informative some-sentence mentally entertains a linguistic representation of the negation of a stronger alternative (All X are Y). Yet, there is no evidence that judging an under-informative some-sentence false or infelicitous actually involves the derivation of the some, but not all scalar implicature. We report three experiments consisting of a sentence-picture verification task followed by a forced choice between two paraphrases of the sentence initially assessed. These experiments robustly show that hearers who reject an under-informative some-sentence do so without explicitly entertaining a some, but not all implicature. Our results represent a strong challenge for grammatical accounts of scalar implicature, which all presuppose a mechanism of negation of stronger alternatives, and force a drastic reinterpretation of processing data on scalar implicatures. More generally, our findings show that one should not conflate psychological models of pragmatic processing with a reconstructed link between sentences and their potential meanings., SCOPUS: re.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

La migration, cadrée en « crises » successives (Balty & Mistiaen, 2022), est mise en mots par différents acteurs qui tentent d’en imposer leur propre perception et, par conséquent, les mesures qu’ils jugent nécessaires à cet égard. Dans cette « lutte pour l’appropriation des signes-pouvoirs » (Bonnafous & Tournier, 1995) où « tous parlent pour persuader » (Orkibi, 2015), la parole contestataire de soutien aux migrants s’élève comme une remise en cause d’une doxa, du cadre qui pense et dit les migrations aujourd’hui (Jacquez, 2015). De l’ordre de l'insurrection, elle transgresse, conteste, interroge les valeurs de la société, les priorités politiques, les idées reçues… S’agit-il d’une « crise des migrants » ou d’une « crise de l’humanité » ?Les migrants sont-ils des « illégaux » ou des « citoyens » ?Cette dimension symbolique du discours militant joue un rôle-clé dans « l’évolution et la transformation du vocabulaire et du discours qui gèrent le système des normes et des valeurs de notre société » (Orkibi, 2015, p. 14). Les mots, leur choix, leur(s) sens et la réflexivité dont ils font – ou non – l’objet en discours sont autant d’observatoires non seulement des positionnements et perceptions de ces acteurs par rapport à la migration (et, par conséquent, les uns par rapport aux autres), mais aussi de la manière dont, par le langage, ils tentent de changer les perceptions de la société. C’est à ces pratiques discursives que la présente recherche s’intéresse :comment ces acteurs militants – migrants, associatifs et citoyens en particulier – de la « cause des migrants » en Belgique et à Bruxelles tentent-ils de changer les perceptions de la migration à l’aide des mots ?Et inversement :comment changent-ils les mots de la migration selon leur perception de la réalité ?Portant une attention particulière à la construction du sens en discours, la recherche explore la réflexivité politique et langagière des acteurs.La thèse s’ancre en analyse de discours, et plus particulièrem, Migration is nowadays framed in successive “crises” (Balty & Mistiaen, 2022) and put into words by different actors who try to impose their own perception of it and, consequently, their own agenda. In this “struggle for the appropriation of signs-power” (Bonnafous & Tournier, 1995), where “everyone speaks to persuade” (Orkibi, 2015), our translation, the protest discourse of actors supporting migrants rises as a challenge to a doxa, to the framework that thinks and says migration today (Jacquez, 2015). This protest discourse transgresses, challenges, questions society’s values, political priorities, and preconceptions. Is this a “migrant crisis” or a “crisis of humanity”? Are migrants “illegals” or “citizens”? This symbolic dimension of activist discourse plays a key role in “the evolution and transformation of the vocabulary and discourse that manage our society’s system of norms and values” (Orkibi, 2015, p. 14, our translation). Words, their choice, their meaning(s) and the reflexivity and metadiscourses around them are all observatories not only of the positionings and perceptions of these social actors in relation to migration (and, consequently, to each other), but also of the way in which, through language, they attempt to change society’s perceptions. The present research focuses on these discursive practices: how do the activist actors – migrants, associations, and citizens in particular – of the “migrant cause” in Belgium and Brussels attempt to change perceptions of migration using words? And vice versa: how do they change the words of migration according to their perception of reality? Paying particular attention to the construction of meaning in discourse, the research explores the political and linguistic reflexivity of activist actors.Rooted in discourse analysis, and more specifically in discursive semantics, the present thesis sets out to analyse the denominations used by six (collective) activist actors to refer to people on the move: CIRÉ, Vluchte, Doctorat en Information et communication, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Purpose: Our study addresses three main questions: (a) Do autistics and neurotypicals produce different patterns of disfluencies, depending on the experimenter's direct versus averted gaze? (b) Are these patterns correlated to gender, skin conductance responses, fixations on the experimenter's face, alexithymia, or social anxiety scores? Lastly, (c) can eye-tracking and electrodermal activity data be used in distinguishing listener- versus speaker-oriented disfluencies? Method: Within a live face-to-face paradigm combining a wearable eye-tracker with electrodermal activity sensors, 80 adults (40 autistics, 40 neurotypicals) defined words in front of an experimenter who was either staring at their eyes (direct gaze condition) or looking elsewhere (averted gaze condition). Results: Autistics produce less listener-oriented ( uh ,um ) and more speaker-oriented (prolongations, breath) disfluencies than neurotypicals. In both groups, men produce less um than women. Both autistics' and neurotypicals' speech are influenced by whether their interlocutor systematically looks at them in the eyes or not, but their reactions go in opposite directions. Disfluencies seem to primarily be linguistic phenomena as experienced stress, social attention, alexithymia, and social anxiety scores do not influence any of the reported results. Finally, eye-tracking and electrodermal activity data suggest that laughter could be a listener-oriented disfluency. Conclusions: This article studies disfluencies in a fine-grained way in autistic and neurotypical adults while controlling for social attention, experienced stress, and experimental condition (direct vs. averted gaze). It adds to current literature by (a) enlightening our knowledge of speech in autism, (b) opening new perspectives on disfluency patterns as important signals in social interaction, (c) addressing theoretical issues on the dichotomy between listener- and speaker-oriented disfluencies, and (d) considering understudied phenomen, SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

This thesis asks why social interaction unfolding in autistic adults and children is often characterised as atypical. To answer this question, I investigated two main hypotheses: the Social Motivation Theory and the Social Anxiety Hypothesis. The five studies comprised in this dissertation are based on three different paradigms: [1] social attention in 40 autistic (20 women; 20 men) and 40 neurotypical adults (matched on age, gender and IQ) in front of speaking videos of actors displaying a direct or averted gaze; [2] social attention and [3] disfluency production in the same sample during a live face-to-face cognitive task with an experimenter displaying a direct or averted gaze; [4] social attention and [5] interactional behaviours in 18 autistic children matched on gender (15 boys; 3 girls) and mental (18) or chronological (18) age to neurotypicals during a real-life recreational task with a familiar or unfamiliar adult experimenter. The investigation of these social aspects has been based on eye- tracking measures, electrodermal activity and fine-grained disfluency and interactional behaviours coding.In Study [1], I found an absence of preference for direct versus averted gaze in the autistic group, probably because of difficulties in distinguishing eye gaze direction. In Study [2], I found no difference in social attention between autistic and neurotypical adults, but an increased experienced arousal in neurotypicals whose direct gaze was not reciprocated. We could wonder whether the neurotypicals' discomfort could provoke a more insistent looking for eye contact behaviour, potentially leading to autistics' uneasiness. In Study [3], I found less listener- and more speaker-oriented disfluencies in the autistic speech, potentially contributing to neurotypicals' difficulties in understanding it. In Study [4], I found similar social attention, experienced stress and familiarity effect in autistic and neurotypical children. This suggests that real-life results could, Doctorat en Langues, lettres et traductologie, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Many autistics report being distressed by eye contact, but eye-tracking studies suggest that eye contact is associated with hypo-arousal rather than hyper-arousal in autism. Within a live face-to-face paradigm combining a wearable eye-tracker with electrodermal activity sensors, 80 adults (40 autistics) defined words in front of an experimenter either staring at their eyes (direct gaze condition) or looking elsewhere (averted gaze condition). Autistics did not differ from neurotypicals in their eye behaviours nor their skin conductance responses. Autistics did not appear distressed when they were looking at the experimenter’s eyes in the direct gaze condition. However, neurotypicals, compared to autistics, might experience more stress when looking at the experimenter in the averted gaze condition, even after controlling for social anxiety and alexithymia. In comparison to autistics, neurotypicals might be hyper-aroused when they look at someone avoiding eye contact. Based on a bidirectional perspective on interactional difficulties in autism, we speculate that the neurotypicals’ distress when their attempts to eye contact are not reciprocated could make their behaviour insistent, which, in turn, could make the autistics uncomfortable. In our study, participants’ partner remained passive, displaying no specific reaction when a mutual gaze was shared or not. Future studies should test different partner reactions to gaze in various social contexts. Lay abstract What is already known about the topic? Autistics are usually reported to share less eye contact than neurotypicals with their interlocutors. However, the reason why autistics might pay less attention to eyes looking at them is still unknown: some autistics express being hyper-aroused by this eye contact, while some eye-tracking studies suggest that eye contact is associated with hypo-arousal in autism. What this paper adds? This study is based on a highly controlled live face-to-face paradigm, combining a wearab, SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

In this study, we report an extensive investigation of the structural language and acoustical specificities of the spontaneous speech of ten three- to five-year-old verbal autistic children. The autistic children were compared to a group of ten typically developing children matched pairwise on chronological age, nonverbal IQ and socioeconomic status, and groupwise on verbal IQ and gender on various measures of structural language (phonetic inventory, lexical diversity and morpho-syntactic complexity) and a series of acoustical measures of speech (mean and range fundamental frequency, a formant dispersion index, syllable duration, jitter and shimmer). Results showed that, overall, the structure and acoustics of the verbal autistic children’s speech were highly similar to those of the TD children. Few remaining atypicalities in the speech of autistic children lay in a restricted use of different vocabulary items, a somewhat diminished morpho-syntactic complexity, and a slightly exaggerated syllable duration., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

In many autistic children, speech onset is delayed and expressive language emerges after 3 years of age. We qualitatively and quantitatively describe oral productions of autistic preschoolers, including many non- or minimally speaking, recorded during interactions with a caregiver and with an experimenter. Data clustering on manually coded oral production samples indicates five validated linguistic profiles of oral production in this diverse and inclusive sample (n = 59) of 3- to 5-year-old autistic children with highly variable expressive language abilities. These profiles are then compared on a series of demographic (age, socioeconomic status) and psychometric (autism severity, nonverbal and verbal IQ) measures, as well as on additional measures of language (expressive vocabulary, phonetic inventories). Two clusters are composed of speaking autistic children, while the three others comprise non- or minimally speaking children with qualitatively different patterns of vocal productions. The five-profile division suggests that traditional binary division of speaking vs nonspeaking children does not do justice to the complexity of early expressive language in autism., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

This article reviews the current knowledge state on pragmatic and structural language abilities in autism and their potential relation to extralinguistic abilities and autistic traits. The focus is on questions regarding autism language profiles with varying degrees of (selective) impairment and with respect to potential comorbidity of autism and language impairment: Is language impairment in autism the co-occurrence of two distinct conditions (comorbidity), a consequence of autism itself (no comorbidity), or one possible combination from a series of neurodevelopmental properties (dimensional approach)? As for language profiles in autism, three main groups are identified, namely, (i) verbal autistic individuals without structural language impairment, (ii) verbal autistic individuals with structural language impairment, and (iii) minimally verbal autistic individuals. However, this tripartite distinction hides enormous linguistic heterogeneity. Regarding the nature of language impairment in autism, there is currently no model of how language difficulties may interact with autism characteristics and with various extralinguistic cognitive abilities. Building such a model requires carefully designed explorations that address specific aspects of language and extralinguistic cognition. This should lead to a fundamental increase in our understanding of language impairment in autism, thereby paving the way for a substantial contribution to the question of how to best characterize neurodevelopmental disorders.

This article reviews the current knowledge state on pragmatic and structural language abilities in autism and their potential relation to extralinguistic abilities and autistic traits. The focus is on questions regarding autism language profiles with varying degrees of (selective) impairment and with respect to potential comorbidity of autism and language impairment: Is language impairment in autism the co-occurrence of two distinct conditions (comorbidity), a consequence of autism itself (no comorbidity), or one possible combination from a series of neurodevelopmental properties (dimensional approach)? As for language profiles in autism, three main groups are identified, namely, (i) verbal autistic individuals without structural language impairment, (ii) verbal autistic individuals with structural language impairment, and (iii) minimally verbal autistic individuals. However, this tripartite distinction hides enormous linguistic heterogeneity. Regarding the nature of language impairment in autism, there is currently no model of how language difficulties may interact with autism characteristics and with various extralinguistic cognitive abilities. Building such a model requires carefully designed explorations that address specific aspects of language and extralinguistic cognition. This should lead to a fundamental increase in our understanding of language impairment in autism, thereby paving the way for a substantial contribution to the question of how to best characterize neurodevelopmental disorders.

This article reviews the current knowledge state on pragmatic and structural language abilities in autism and their potential relation to extralinguistic abilities and autistic traits. The focus is on questions regarding autism language profiles with varying degrees of (selective) impairment and with respect to potential comorbidity of autism and language impairment: Is language impairment in autism the co-occurrence of two distinct conditions (comorbidity), a consequence of autism itself (no comorbidity), or one possible combination from a series of neurodevelopmental properties (dimensional approach)? As for language profiles in autism, three main groups are identified, namely, (i) verbal autistic individuals without structural language impairment, (ii) verbal autistic individuals with structural language impairment, and (iii) minimally verbal autistic individuals. However, this tripartite distinction hides enormous linguistic heterogeneity. Regarding the nature of language impairment in autism, there is currently no model of how language difficulties may interact with autism characteristics and with various extralinguistic cognitive abilities. Building such a model requires carefully designed explorations that address specific aspects of language and extralinguistic cognition. This should lead to a fundamental increase in our understanding of language impairment in autism, thereby paving the way for a substantial contribution to the question of how to best characterize neurodevelopmental disorders., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

BackgroundIn the spring of 2020, Belgian authorities enforced a full lockdown period to contain the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. This lockdown drastically disrupted the daily life of autistic individuals’ and that of their families. In the midst of these extraordinary circumstances, we assessed the impact of social restrictions on autistic individuals’ behavior and their parents’ or caregivers’ quality of life; we also sought to identify individual characteristics that may influence such changes.MethodsWe designed an online survey targeting caregivers living with an autistic child or adult. The questionnaire included 125 five-point Likert questions which targeted changes in families’ quality of life and in autistic individuals’ behavior, as well as factors likely to influence the extent and direction of these changes.ResultsWe collected data from 209 French-speaking Belgian respondents. Respondents reported that the lockdown brought about a higher frequency of nonfunctional socio-communicative behaviors, as well as a decrease in families’ quality of life. Parents who had less access to respite care experienced a steeper decrease in their quality of life. Autistic individuals with comorbidities, and whose parents had less access to respite care and implemented fewer rules at home during lockdown were more likely to display nonfunctional socio-communicative behaviors.ConclusionCOVID-19 lockdown restrictions had a negative impact on both autistic individuals and their parents., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Démocratique du Congo (RDC). Elle vise à déterminer l’impact et l’appropriation de la formation dispensée par l’Initiative Francophone pour la Formation à Distance des Maitres (IFADEM) et à apporter des pistes pour améliorer l’appropriation du dispositif.À partir d’une étude de cas des pratiques de classe mises en place portant sur les fiches de préparation des enseignants, le filmage des séances de classe et des entretiens semi-directifs, nous avons cherché à identifier les indicateurs de l’impact de la formation reçue sur les pratiques pédagogiques effectives des enseignants formés en matière d’enseignement / apprentissage de la communication orale.L’équilibre de nos analyses, offert par le choix d’une méthodologie d’étude de cas, confirme que le parcours d’appropriation de la formation à travers une conformité aux pratiques proposées et leur qualité est déterminé par des relations d’interdépendance entre des facteurs relevant de la formation reçue (initiale ou continue), des facteurs personnels (expériences professionnelles, recherches personnelles) et des facteurs interpersonnels (apport des collègues, du tuteur, des inspecteurs).Elle nous permet également de montrer dans quelle mesure les enseignants bénéficiaires de la formation IFADEM ont amélioré leurs pratiques de classe mais qu’ils ont besoin d’accompagnement pour mettre en pratique la formation théorique reçue et ainsi s’approprier plus complètement la formation.La symbiose du bon côté de la formation et de l’approche par les compétences, à laquelle les enseignants sont formés à travers le Programme National de l’Enseignement Primaire, améliore les pratiques de classe au primaire en RDC., This thesis focuses on the continuing education of primary school teachers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It aims to determine the impact and appropriation of the training provided by the Initiative francophone pour la Formationà Distance des Maîtres (IFADEM) and to provide ways to improve the appropriation of the system.From a case study of classroom practices based on teacher preparation sheets, filming of class sessions and semi-structured interviews, we sought to identify the indicators of the impact of the training received on the effective pedagogical practices of teachers trained in the teaching/learning of oral communication.The balance of our analyzes, offered by the choice of a case study methodology, confirms that the course of appropriation of training through its compliance with the proposed practices and their quality is determined by relationships of interdependence between factors relating to the training received (initial or continuing), personal factors (professional experience, personal research) and interpersonal factors (contribution of colleagues, tutor, inspectors).It also allows us to show how teachers benefiting from the IFADEM training have improved their classroom practices but that they need support to put into practice the theoretical training received and thus take more ownership of the training.The symbiosis of the good side of training and the competency-based approach, in which teachers are trained through the National Program for Primary Education, improves classroom practices in primary education in the DRC., Doctorat en Langues, lettres et traductologie, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Socio-communicative interaction is known to be central to language acquisition in typically developing (TD) children. As such, TD infants’ natural inclination for the socially relevant events in their environment is said to facilitate the acquisition process. Atypicalities in interactions with others as well as a reduced tendency to orient towards naturally occurring social stimuli lie at the core of the characterization of autism spectrum disorder. Interestingly though, despite initial and persistent socio-communicative disabilities, around 70% of autistic children eventually manage to acquire functional speech.In this dissertation, I provide an in-depth description of the social attention and linguistic abilities of 61 three- to five-year-old autistic children, including many with no or limited language, and 61 age-matched TD children. More specifically, this dissertation is divided into three parts, each of which reports studies based on specific population samples pooled from this larger sample of 122 children.Part 1 reports findings from three passive free-viewing eye-tracking tasks which target different features of visual social attention in the two groups of children. The three tasks assess whether the children are sensitive to the socially relevant information in the presented stimuli: pointing fingers, the eyes and the mouth regions, and gaze direction. Results from eye-tracking task 1 showed that autistic children failed to discriminate intentional and incidental pointing gestures. Results from eye-tracking task 2 showed that both autistic and TD children’s visual attention were attracted by the mouth as an adult started speaking, but that TD, and not autistic, children rapidly shifted their attention back to the eyes as the actor continued speaking. Results from eye-tracking task 3 showed that autistic children were sensitive to gaze direction by showing a typical preference for direct over obvious averted gaze and an atypical preference for subtle avert, Doctorat en Langues, lettres et traductologie, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

The goal of this article is to provide a balanced assessment of the significance autism has for the scientific study of language. While linguistic profiles in autism vary greatly, spanning from a total absence of functional language to verbal levels within the typical range, the entire autism spectrum is robustly characterized by lifelong disabilities in intersubjective communication and per-sistent difficulties in adopting the perspective of other people. In that sense, autism constitutes a unique profile in which linguistic competence is dissociated from communication skills. Some-what paradoxically, autism is often mentioned to underscore the importance of mind reading for language use and of intersubjective communication for the emergence of language. Yet experimental studies on pragmatics in autism indicate that many pragmatic processes unfold without adopting one’s conversational partner’s perspective. Moreover, the patterns of language acquisition and learning in autism represent a strong challenge to the central role constructionist theories assign to socio-communicative skills. Data on autism thus force a reconsideration of the a priori conceptual boundaries on language learnability that shape the foundational debates between constructionist and nativist linguistic theories.*., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Whereas a reduced tendency to follow pointing gestures is described as an early sign of autism, the literature on response to joint attention indicates that autistic children perform better when a point is added to other social cues such as eye gaze. The purpose of this study was to explore pointing processing in autism when it is the only available cue and to investigate whether autistic children discriminate intentional pointing gestures from incidental pointing gestures. Eye movements of 58 autistic children (48 male) and 61 typically developing children (36 male) aged 3–5 years were recorded as the children were watching videos of a person uttering a pseudoword and pointing intentionally with one hand and incidentally with the other hand. After 3 s, two different potential referents for the pseudoword gradually emerged in both pointed-at corners. In comparison with typically developing children, autistic children’s fixations were significantly farther away from both pointed-at zones. Upon hearing a novel word, typically developing children shifted their visual attention toward the zone pointed intentionally. This trend did not emerge in the group of autistic children regardless of their level of vocabulary. Autistic children, independently of their level of language, pay little attention to pointing when no other social cues are available and fail to discriminate intentional pointing gestures from incidental ones. They seem to grasp neither the spatial nor the social value of pointing., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

In the last few decades, there has been increased interest in the incorporation of data from bi- and multilingual individuals in linguistic theory: from second language acquisition and language attrition to heritage varieties and code-switching. This dissertation discusses a range of ways in which code-switching data can provide insight into the mechanisms that underlie linguistic structures. The data will be analysed within the framework of Minimalist Generative syntax and Distributed Morphology.The first part investigates grammatical gender assignment in code- switching between English, a language without grammatical gender, and two languages with grammatical gender: French and Belgian Dutch. These languages have comparable, but different gender systems. French has two genders: masculine and feminine, whereas Belgian Dutch adds a third: neuter. The study in this part of the dissertation compares gen- der assignment strategies in bilinguals with different profiles. In addition, the code-switching data provide evidence against the default status of neuter in Belgian Dutch.The second part focuses on word order and includes two studies: one on verb-second word order in Dutch-English code-switching and one on adverb placement in English-French and Dutch-English code- switching. The verb-second chapter identifies a lacuna in the traditional Generative analysis for verb second and uses the CS data to address this. The chapter on adverb position looks at placement of the adverb between the verb and its direct object, which is allowed in Dutch and French, but not in English. For all domains investigated, it is found that the finite verb predicts word order.Taken together, these studies demonstrate that bilingual data can shine a light on elements of the theory of grammar which remain in the shadows when only monolingual data is used., Les dernières décennies ont vu croître l’intérêt pour l’intégration à la réflexion en linguistique théorique des données produites par des locuteurs/trices bilingues ou multilingues, que celles-ci concernent l’acquisition d’une langue seconde, l’attrition, les langues d’héritage ou l’alternance codique. Le présent travail développe plusieurs exemples où les données issues de l’alternance codique éclairent les mécanismes qui sous-tendent les structures linguistiques. Les données recueillies sont interprétées dans le cadre de la syntaxe générative minimaliste et de la morphologie distribuée (« distributed morphology »).Dans un premier temps, nous analysons l’attribution du genre grammatical dans l’alternance entre l’anglais, d’une part, et le français et le néerlandais de Belgique, de l’autre. Alors qu’il n’y a pas en anglais de genre grammatical, le français et le néerlandais de Belgique marquent ce genre, mais de façon différente :si le français distingue deux genres, masculin et féminin, le néerlandais de Belgique y adjoint un troisième, le neutre. Dans cette partie de la thèse, nous dressons le profil des stratégies d’attribution du genre auprès de deux types distincts de bilingues et nous établissons également que le neutre n’est pas le genre par défaut en néerlandais de Belgique.Dans un second temps, nous nous penchons sur l’ordre des constituants. Dans une première étude, nous examinons l’ordre des mots avec « verbe second » (V2) dans l’alternance anglais-néerlandais. Nous abordons ensuite le placement de l’adverbe dans l’alternance anglais- français et anglais-néerlandais. Le chapitre consacré à V2 identifie une lacune dans la littérature générative et tire profit des données de l’al- ternance pour y proposer une solution. Le chapitre consacré à l’adverbe s’intéresse au placement de celui-ci entre le verbe et son objet, position licite en français et néerlandais mais pas en anglais. Dans ces deux études, il apparaît que c’est la langue du verbe à la forme fini, Doctorat en Langues, lettres et traductologie, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Low integration of speech sounds with the mouth movements likely contributes to language acquisition disabilities that frequently characterize young autistic children. However, the existing empirical evidence either relies on complex verbal instructions or merely focuses on preferential gaze on in-synch videos. The former method is clearly unadapted for young, minimally, or nonverbal autistic children, while the latter has several biases, making it difficult to interpret the data. We designed a Reinforced Preferential Gaze paradigm that allows to test multimodal integration in young, nonverbal autistic children and overcomes several of the methodological challenges faced by previous studies. We show that autistic children have difficulties in temporally binding the speech signal with the corresponding articulatory gestures. A condition with structurally similar nonsocial video stimuli suggests that atypical multimodal integration in autism is not limited to speech stimuli, ULBabyLab, SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Ce travail propose une théorie générale de l'interface entre deux dimensions du fait musical : sa dimension sémantique (les significations que la musique peut contenir) et sa dimension pragmatique (ses usages en contexte). Cette théorie se situe dans une perspective naturaliste, au carrefour de trois disciplines : la philosophie de l'esprit, la psychologie cognitive et la musicologie historique. Elle part du postulat que la sémantique et la pragmatique de la musique sont des cas particuliers de certaines normes universelles (par exemple la norme de vérité) et certaines dispositions cognitives et sociales de l'être humain, pour l'essentiel non spécifiques à ce qu'on appelle la musique, l'art et l'esthétique. La première partie trace les grandes lignes de la théorie. Elle se fonde sur les travaux du linguiste et philosophe Philippe Schlenker. On y défend deux thèses principales : une thèse sémantique et une thèse pragmatique. La thèse sémantique soutient que toute signification musicale est indexicale, c'est-à-dire que toute signification musicale consiste dans le fait d'attribuer à une unité formellement cohérente de sons musicaux un ensemble de causes probables. Ces causes probables des sons musicaux peuvent être des entités réelles et/ou fictives, des entités objectives et/ou subjectives, des entités productrices de son ou non. Dans tous les cas, ces entités sont situées dans le contexte d'écoute de la musique, et la musique les « indique » à l'auditeur (d'où le terme « indexical »). Ces entités sont alors tenues pour être les contenus indexicaux vrais ou faux de la musique. La thèse pragmatique soutient que toute communication en musique consiste à organiser intentionnellement (y compris à distance, via des dispositifs de médiation adéquats, tels que des programmes, des techniques et lieux d'écoute, des rituels et autres conventions) la relation entre la musique composée/interprétée d'une part, et le contexte effectif ou supposé où cette musique sera perçue d'autr, This PhD aims to build a general theory of the interface between two dimensions of music : its semantic dimension (i.e. the meaningful nature of music) and its pragmatic dimension (i.e. the uses of music in context). The theory is grounded in a naturalistic perspective, at the intersection of three disciplines :philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology and historical musicology. The basic premise is that semantics and pragmatics of music are just particular cases of certain universal norms (i.e. the norm of truth) and certain social-cognitive dispositions of the human being, essentially non specific to what is usually called music, art or æsthetics. The first part outlines the main aspects of the theory, building on the work of linguist and philosopher Philippe Schlenker. We defend two claims :a semantic one and a pragmatic one. The semantic claim is that every musical meaning is indexical. In other words, a musical meaning is the set of possible causes attributed to a formally coherent unit of musical sounds, be they real and/or fictional causes, objective and/or subjective causes, sound producing or not sound producing causes. In any case, these possible causes are entities that are located within the listening context and are “indicated” by the music to the listener (hence the use of the word “indexical”). The entities that have possibly caused the musical sounds are, then, considered to be the true or false indexical content of the music. The pragmatic claim is that communication in music consists in organizing intentionally (including indirectly, at a distance, by means of relevant devices, such as programs, listening technologies, performance places, rites and other conventions, etc.) the relation between the composed and/or performed music and the supposed or effective context where the music would be listened, in order to enhance as much as possible the relevance of the true or false indexical meanings, inferred from the musical listening in this context. In, Doctorat en Langues, lettres et traductologie, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Discourse studies investigating differences in the socio-communicative profiles of autistic (ASD) and neurotypical (NT) individuals have mostly relied on orthographic transcriptions, without taking prosodic information into account. However, atypical prosody is ubiquitous in ASD and a more accurate representation of their discourse abilities should also include prosodic cues. This exploratory study addresses this gap by segmenting the spoken discourse of 12 ASD and NT adults using the framework of Basic Discourse Units (BDUs). BDUs result from the mapping of syntactic boundaries on prosodic units, which can coincide in different ways and are associated with different discourse strategies. We hypothesized that the discourse of ASD adults would display more atypical strategies than NT adults, reflecting a ‘pedantic’ style and more difficulties in managing ongoing discourse. While ASD adults did not produce more discourse units associated with didactic or pedantic strategies than NT adults, they did produce less units associated with strategies of interactional regulation. This study provides initial evidence that multidimensional linguistic units, such as BDUs can help differentiate speech delivery strategies of ASD adults from those of their NT peers, even based on simple prosodic cues like silent pauses., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

This study examined whether the atypical speech style that is frequently reported in autistic adults is underpinned by an inflexible production of phonetic targets. In a first task, 20 male autistic adults and 20 neuro-typicals had to read and produce native vowels. To assess the extent to which phonetic inflexibility is due to an overall fine-grained control of phonetic behavior or to a lack of flexibility in the realization of one's phonological repertoire, the second task asked participants to reproduce artificial vowel-like sounds. Results confirmed the presence of a greater articulatory stability in the production of native vowels in autistic adults. When instructed to imitate artificial vowel-like sounds, the autistic group did not better approximate the targets' acoustic properties relative to neuro-typicals but their performance at reproducing artificial vowels was less variable and influenced to a greater extent by the articulatory properties of their own vocalic space. These findings suggest that the greater articulatory stability observed in autistic adults arises from a lack of flexibility in the production of their own native vowels. The two phonetic tasks are devoid of any pragmatic constraint, which indicates that phonetic inflexibility in autism is partly independent of register selection. Lay Summary: Autistic and neuro-typical adults took part in two tasks: one in which they produced vowels from French, their native tongue, and the other where they imitated unfamiliar vowels. Autistic adults displayed significantly less variation in their production of different French vowels. In imitating unfamiliar vowels, they were more influenced by the way they pronounce French vowels. These results suggest that the atypical speech style, frequently attested in autistic individuals, could stem from an unusually stable pronunciation of speech sounds., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Background: Studies on impression formation in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have suggested that both ASD and neurotypical (NT) individuals extract paralinguistic cues (e.g. vocal and facial expressions) from brief extracts of social behaviors to form less favorable impressions of the personality traits of ASD individuals than of their NT peers. Yet, discourse studies in ASD have also suggested that there are specific linguistic features (e.g. conjunctions) that can distinguish the speech of ASD individuals from that of NT individuals. This study investigates whether naïve participants with and without autism can perceive discourse features previously identified as characteristic of ASD speech, based on a single exposure to conversation extracts. Methods: A cross-design rating experiment was created whereby a group of ASD and NT adults (blind to diagnosis information) rated audio recordings involving ASD and NT speakers. Rating participants evaluated the recordings using a Likert scale targeting impressions of discourse features. Results: ASD and NT Raters behaved similarly on the ratings of discourse features; evaluating the speech of ASD Speakers less favorably than those of NT Speakers. Conclusion: Our results extend previous findings by showing that linguistic cues also lead to less favorable impressions of the discourse of ASD Speakers, and this from both the perspective of NT and ASD Raters., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Une étude des politiques et des pratiques linguistiques ainsi que des attitudes et perceptions de l'élite burundaise révèle des rapports diglossiques entre les langues en présence dans le paysage linguistique de ce pays. En particulier le français et le kirundi entretiennent des rapports diglossiques. Le français est privilégié dans les supports écrits et dans des conversations impliquant des relations de rôles, tandis que le kirundi est préféré dans les conversations orales sans relations de rôles et dans le discours social. Une alternance codique caractérise les le discours oral de l'élite en kirundi où le français est utilisé comme langue insérée, révélant également que le français est porteur d'un statut social., Doctorat en Langues, lettres et traductologie, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Previous studies have shown that people are truth-biased in that they tend to believe the information they receive, even if it is clearly flagged as false. The truth bias has been recently proposed to be an instance of meta-cognitive myopia, that is, of a generalized human insensitivity towards the quality and correctness of the information available in the environment. In two studies we tested whether meta-cognitive myopia and the ensuing truth bias may operate in a courtroom setting. Based on a well-established paradigm in the truth-bias literature, we asked mock jurors (Study 1) and professional judges (Study 2) to read two crime reports containing aggravating or mitigating information that was explicitly flagged as false. Our findings suggest that jurors and judges are truth-biased, as their decisions and memory about the cases were affected by the false information. We discuss the implications of the potential operation of the truth bias in the courtroom, in the light of the literature on inadmissible and discredible evidence, and make some policy suggestions., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

While narrative competence has been well documented in autistic children and young adolescents, fairly little is known about narrative performance of autistic adults. However, narrative abilities continue to develop well into adulthood. Hence, the main objective of the present study is to provide a clearer linguistic and communicative profile of ASD in adulthood by performing a systematic description of narrative performance in autistic adults. A specific annotation scheme was developed to code narrative production, in order to be able to compare the production of autistic participants to pairwise matched neurotypical adults relative to microstructure (syntactic complexity), macrostructure (overall story structure and cohesive ties) and internal state language of the corpus' narratives. The results suggest that autistic adults performed worse than their neurotypical peers on all three dimensions of narrative production, resulting in less coherent narratives overall for autistic adults., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Background With the overarching objective to gain better insights into social attention in autistic adults, the present study addresses three outstanding issues about face processing in autism. First, do autistic adults display a preference for mouths over eyes; second, do they avoid direct gaze; third, is atypical visual exploration of faces in autism mediated by gender, social anxiety or alexithymia? Methods We used a novel reinforced preferential looking paradigm with a group of autistic adults ( n = 43, 23 women) pairwise matched on age with neurotypical participants ( n = 43, 21 women). Participants watched 28 different pairs of 5 s video recordings of a speaking person: the two videos, simultaneously displayed on the screen, were identical except that gaze was directed at the camera in one video and averted in the other. After a 680 ms transition phase, a short reinforcement animation appeared on the side that had displayed the direct gaze. Results None of the groups showed a preference for mouths over eyes. However, neurotypical participants fixated significantly more the stimuli with direct gaze, while no such preference emerged in autistic participants. As the experiment progressed, neurotypical participants also increasingly anticipated the appearance of the reinforcement, based on the location of the stimulus with the direct gaze, while no such anticipation emerged in autistic participants. Limitations Our autistic participants scored higher on the social anxiety and alexithymia questionnaires than neurotypicals. Future studies should match neurotypical and autistic participants on social anxiety and alexithymia and complement questionnaires with physiological measures of anxiety. Conclusions The absence of preference for direct versus averted gaze in the autistic group is probably due to difficulties in distinguishing eye gaze direction, potentially linked to a reduced spontaneous exploration or avoidance of the eye region. Social attention an, SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

The aim of this thesis is to develop a theoretical framework that could account for the problems arising in the translation of oral history interviews. While focusing on literary, economic and technical texts, Translation Studies has neglected the examination of Oral History. In order to fill in this major lacuna in the research literature, I ask two fundamental questions: Which are the linguistic problems and challenges (if any) of such texts in translation? How do these translated oral history interviews articulate the communist experience? I do so to call attention to the mutual benefits that can be gained from such an intersectional approach. To instantiate the case, I translate from Romanian into English transcribed interviews given by three categories of people: those involved in the anti-communist armed resistance in the Carpathian Mountains (extracted from the book Memorialul Durerii: Întuneric şi Lumină, by Lucia Hossu-Longin), political prisoners (Supravieţuitorii: Mărturii din temniţele comuniste ale României, by Raul and Anca Ştef) and King Michael I of Romania (Convorbiri cu Mihai I al României, by Mircea Ciobanu). Importing Portelli’s theoretical framework from the field of Oral History allows me to identify the features of historical interviews (orality, narrative, subjectivity, performativity) and account for their difficulties in translation. However, since the Italian researcher negates the orality of transcribed interviews, I manage to solve this problem by proposing the term ‘fictive orality’ (Koch&Osterreicher) and the triad ‘vividness (repetitions/imagery), immediacy (direct speech), fragmentation (ambiguity/ellipsis)’. Defining thus the orality of my written data, I map out the translational problematics of oral testimonies on communism and contend that fragmentation presents the most difficult challenges in translation. Additionally, my results point at the copious use of repetitions, visual/kinaesthetic/organic images, and direct speech. The, Doctorat en Langues, lettres et traductologie, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

The dissertation lays the foundations for a naturalistic account of word meaning capable of addressing the conflicting intuitions that word meanings are both “out there”, world-involving and objective (the “objectivist” intuition) and in the heads of speakers, i.e. cognitive and perspectival (the “mentalist” intuition). The strong naturalization constraint endorsed in this project has it that the sought-after syncretic notion of word meaning must be nonmysterious and constitute a potential object for the natural sciences. The objectivist intuition is discussed within the framework of semantic externalism and the theory of semantic deference. Whereas the importance of the phenomenon of semantic deference (i.e. the fact that speakers defer to semantic standards for the fixation of the meaning of their words) is recognized, it is shown that taking the normativity of meaning evidenced by semantic deference at face value leads to embracing a form of meaning objectivism that is incompatible with naturalism. On the one hand, the objectivist/externalist commitment to independent meaning-determining realities could be stronger than the commitments actually undertaken by the natural sciences themselves. On the other hand, the degree of idealization inherent in the objectivist account makes it oddly disconnected from and ultimately irrelevant to actual linguistic practice. However, usage-based accounts – which have meanings determined by the way words are actually used rather than determined “from outside” – notoriously struggle to provide a satisfactory account of the normativity of meaning. The proposed move consists in biting the bullet and treating the inherent normativity of meaning as a form of cognitive illusion, albeit an unavoidable illusion and one which must be taken seriously in order to explain the properties of linguistic understanding. A strictly usage-based account is shown to be viable and even to be able to account for the objectivist explanandum, once it is, Doctorat en Langues et lettres, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Une étude des rapports et des politiques linguistiques ainsi que des attitudes et perceptions de l’élite burundaise par rapport aux langues enseignées dans ce pays révèle des rapports diglossiques entre le français comme ancienne langue de colonisation et le kirundi, la langue locale parlée par presque toute la population. En effet, une répartition des fonctions entre ces deux langues est encore très nette, le français étant réservé principalement aux productions écrites et à des situations de relations de rôles du type employé/employeur, professeur/étudiant, etc. au moment où le kirundi est privilégié pour les conversations orales et le domaine social. L’élite se distingue par une pratique d’alternance codique qui reflète leurs attitudes par rapport aux deux langues. Le français est une langue rarement parlée pendant que le kirundi n’est pas engagé dans la conquête des fonctions normalement réservées aux langues officielles. En outre, la tendance de la politique linguistique actuelle au Burundi est de répondre à des sollicitations extérieures, notamment celles de la Communauté Est-Africaine (EAC) plutôt anglophone en privilégiant l’anglais et le swahili sans toutefois prévoir des mesures pour s’assurer d’avoir une langue pour l’épanouissement intérieur et une langue d’opportunités et d’ouverture sur le monde extérieur., A study of linguage compétition and language policies as well as attitudes and perceptions of the Burundian elite showed insights over digglossic relations between French, as the former colonial language, and Kirundi, the local language that is spoken by almost the entire population. In fact, there is still a very clear share of functions between the two languages, with French being the language of the written form and used for role-relation conversations such as between an employer/employee, teacher/student, etc. while Kirundi keeps its bigger share in oral conversations and within the social domains. I addition, the elite’s speech is characterized a practice of code alternation that reflects their attitudes vis-à-vis the two languages. French is barely used in oral conversations while Kirundi is not clearly engaging in the competition for functions which are normally occupied by official languages.In addition, the current trend in language policies of Burundi is to respond to external demands, including those of the East-African Community (EAC) which is rather an Anglophone entity, by putting forward English and Swahili languages without taking measures that could ensure coexistence of a local language for the internal development and a language of opportunities and openness to the external world., Doctorat en Langues, lettres et traductologie, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is often associated with impaired perspective-taking skills. Deception is an important indicator of perspective-taking, and therefore may be thought to pose difficulties to people with ASD (e.g. Baron-Cohen in J Child Psychol Psychiatry 3:1141–1155, 1992). To test this hypothesis, we asked participants with and without ASD to play a computerised deception game. We found that participants with ASD were equally likely—and in complex cases of deception even more likely—to deceive and detect deception, and learned deception at a faster rate. However, participants with ASD initially deceived less frequently, and were slower at detecting deception. These results suggest that people with ASD readily engage in deception but may do so through conscious and effortful reasoning about other people’s perspective., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

The purpose of this study was to explore whether children with autism display selectivity in social learning. We investigated the processing of word mappings provided by speakers who differed on previously demonstrated accuracy and on potential degree of reliability in three groups of children (children with autism spectrum disorder, children with developmental language disorder, and typically developing children) aged 4–9 years. In Task 1, one speaker consistently misnamed familiar objects and the second speaker consistently gave correct names. In Task 2, both speakers provided correct information but differed on how they could achieve this accuracy. We analyzed how the speakers’ profiles influenced children's decisions to rely on them in order to learn novel words. We also examined how children attended to the speakers’ testimony by tracking their eye movements and comparing children’ gaze distribution across speakers’ faces and objects of their choice. Results show that children rely on associative trait attribution heuristics to selectively learn from accurate speakers. In Task 1, children in all groups preferred the novel object selected by accurate speakers and directly avoided information provided by previously inaccurate speakers, as revealed by the eye-tracking data. In Task 2, where more sophisticated reasoning about speakers’ reliability was required, only children in the typically developing group performed above chance. Nonverbal intelligence score emerged as a predictor of children's preference for more reliable informational sources. In addition, children with autism exhibited reduced attention to speakers’ faces compared with children in the comparison groups., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

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Subjective impressions of speech delivery in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) as monotonic or over-precise are widespread but still lack robust acoustic evidence. This study provides a detailed acoustic characterization of the specificities of speech in individuals with ASD using an extensive sample of speech data, from the production of narratives and from spontaneous conversation. Syllable-level analyses (30,843 tokens in total) were performed on audio recordings from two sub-tasks of the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule from 20 adults with ASD and 20 pairwise matched neuro-typical adults, providing acoustic measures of fundamental frequency, jitter, shimmer and the first three formants. The results suggest that participants with ASD display a greater articulatory stability in vowel production than neuro-typical participants, both in phonation and articulatory gestures., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Jary and Kissine examine the meaning of imperative sentences, taking the existing relevance-theoretic semantic analysis, in terms of the desirability and potentiality of the described state of affairs, as their point of departure. In their view, a complete account of the interpretation of imperatives has to explain how they can result in the addressee forming an intention to perform an action, and this requires the theory to make room for ‘action representations’ (in addition to factual representations, such as assumptions). They claim that the imperative form is uniquely specified to interface with such action representations., SCOPUS: ch.b, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Notre projet consiste en l’étude du phénomène du café littéraire à Bruxelles entre 1830 et la décennie 1930, selon une approche interdisciplinaire :notre recherche envisage à la fois le café comme lieu historique, géographique et architectural, comme espace social, et comme objet de représentations artistiques et littéraires. Nous étudions dans un premier temps le débit de boissons bruxellois, principalement sous l'angle de ses représentations dans la littérature bruxelloise. Nous envisageons ensuite, dans une seconde partie, le café littéraire en tant que lieu de sociabilité et nous abordons, enfin, dans un dernier chapitre, le rôle qu'il a joué dans la création de formes littéraires particulières., Doctorat en Langues, lettres et traductologie, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Background: Children and adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) show a tendency to preferentially rely on those referential descriptions that have previously been used by their conversational partner. However, such a tendency may become maladaptive in a situation of interaction with different partners who may introduce alternative lexical descriptions for the same referent. Methods: Six-year-old children with ASD, as well as mental- and verbal-age-matched typically developing (TD) children moved items on a touch-screen following instructions by an experimenter. During the entrainment phase, the experimenter introduced lexical descriptions for all the items. Then, either the original experimenter or a new partner, depending on the condition, used alternative descriptions for some items and kept the same descriptions for others. Accuracy and time to locate items were collected. Results: Relative to TD children, children with ASD had more difficulty in recognizing and interpreting referential descriptions when another description has been previously used. Whether a new description was introduced by a new or the original experimenter had no effect in any group. Conclusion: Referential processing in ASD is compromised by impaired ability to confront alternative conceptual perspectives. A potential executive source for these difficulties is discussed., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Pragmatic deficits constitute a central feature of autism, which is highly relevant to Jaswal & Akhtar's criticisms of the social motivation theory of autism. Recent research reveals that while certain context-based interpretations are accessible, more complex pragmatic phenomena remain challenging for people on the spectrum. Such a selective pragmatic impairment is difficult to account for in motivational terms., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Adequate and efficient participation in a social interaction requires the ability to produce and interpret coherent discourse. Coherence can be achieved using a diverse set of cognitive and linguistic tools such as topic continuity or connectives. On the one hand, successful production of coherent discourse requires the ability to integrate these tools in speech, creating continuity and unity between the sequence of utterances in the discourse. For instance, when telling a story, a speaker can maximize coherence by choosing to mark explicitly the relationships between the events with a connective such as ‘then’, ‘however’ or ‘therefore’. On the other hand, the success of the storytelling will also depend upon the listener’s recognition of these cues and their appropriate interpretation. Failing to produce enough coherence cues or to interpret them as such can lead to communication breakdowns or misunderstandings, potentially compromising the on-going interaction. In a neurodevelopmental disorder like autism, characterized by impairments in social communication, autistic individuals often fail to produce and understand coherent discourse.A plethora of studies have already used discourse analysis to examine discourse (in)coherence and (a)typicality in autistic individuals. However, the studies have been one-sided in terms of methodology, viz. investigating either discourse production or comprehension, but not both. They have also been one-sided in terms of the perspective of the analysis, viz. only considering discourse coherence from the standpoint of neurotypical individuals, without also considering the perspective of autistic individuals. However, social communication is a two-sided dynamic, whereby both communication partners, alternating between the roles of speaker and listener, contribute to the coherence of the unfolding discourse. Therefore, the aim of this dissertation is to define the qualities of discourse (in)coherence and (a)typicality in autistic adult, Doctorat en Langues, lettres et traductologie, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

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