Search

Maternal input addressed to children after an early hospitalization (EH) was longitudinally compared to maternal input directed to typically developing children (TD), at 6, 9, 12, 18 and 24 months ...

This study aims to compare word spelling outcomes for French-speaking deaf children with a cochlear implant (CI) with hearing children who matched for age, level of education and gender. A ...

EnglishMusic and speech signals are complex sounds, based on similar acoustic patterns like duration, intensity and pitch, which follow several levels of organization: morphology, phonology, semantics, syntax and pragmatics for speech; rhythm, melody, and harmony for music. One of the most salient components of music is melody, resulting from a set of variations in pitch – correlate of frequency in perception – as a piece unfolds. Similarly, for speech, one of the most prominent components is melody which, combined with tempo and timbre of the voice, forms a real musical partition. In this literature overview, the main question is to know to what extent these two systems of communication, speech and music, are based on common prosodic phenomena, shared or distinct in infants and toddlers whereas the baby perceives in the uterine environment and during its development. From the third trimester of pregnancy, the fetus is already able to perceive rhythms based on a very regular temporal organization similar to those of music. Next, speech perception in newborn infants is related to music cues like accents, rhythm, speech-rate and pauses. At the same time, infant directed speech helps them not only to develop the prosodic forms of their native babbling, first words and early grammar, but also to refine the pragmatic aspects of language expressing their emotions. francaisLa musique et la parole sont des signaux sonores complexes, bases sur les memes configurations acoustiques que sont la duree, l’intensite et la hauteur, qui suivent plusieurs niveaux d’organisation : la morphologie, la phonologie, la semantique, la syntaxe et la pragmatique pour la parole ; le rythme, la melodie, et l’harmonie pour la musique. L’une des composantes les plus saillantes de la musique est sa dimension melodique, resultant d’un ensemble de variations de « hauteur » sonore – correlat perceptif de la frequence – intervenant au fur et a mesure qu’un morceau se deroule. De meme, pour la parole, l’une des composantes les plus saillantes est la melodie qui, combinee au tempo et au timbre de la voix, forme une veritable partition musicale. En nous appuyant sur les donnees de la litterature, nous nous demanderons dans quelle mesure ces deux systemes de communication, parole et musique, s’appuient sur des phenomenes prosodiques communs, partages ou distincts que percoit le bebe dans le milieu uterin et au cours de son developpement. Des le 3e trimestre de grossesse, le fœtus est deja capable de percevoir des rythmes qui reposent sur une organisation temporelle tres reguliere s’apparentant a ceux de la musique. Ensuite, le nouveau-ne presente des capacites de perception de la parole relatives a des indices communs a la musique tels que l’accentuation, le rythme, le debit et les pauses. Parallelement, le langage que les adultes adressent au bebe aide le nourrisson non seulement a parfaire ses connaissances sur les formes prosodiques du babillage, des mots et des phrases de sa langue maternelle mais aussi a exprimer ses emotions dans les aspects pragmatiques du langage.

In this corpus study, it is asked whether young children speaking European French build their early syntax around grammatical or lexical words. Specifically, the study examines the relationship of grammatical and lexical words in three types of syntactic structures (determiner–noun, pronoun–verb and subject pronoun–verb). The corpus included 315 samples from children aged 24–48 months, a period of rapid growth in grammatical morphology and syntax. The results of a series of stepwise multiple regression analyses indicate that prepositions and auxiliaries explain the unique variance in determiner–noun and determiners and prepositions explain the unique variance in pronoun–verb and subject pronoun–verb combinations better than lexical categories. All these strong predictors support the view that grammatical words guide and facilitate syntactic knowledge. Early grammar is based not on a lexicon but on basic grammatical relationships that young children build gradually, making use of the formal distributional properties of their native language.

Mixed and inconsistent findings have been reported across languages concerning grammatical morphology in speakers with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Some researchers argue for a selective sparing of grammar whereas others claim to have identified grammatical deficits. The present study aimed to investigate this issue in 26 participants with ASD speaking European French who were matched on age, gender and SES to 26 participants with typical development (TD). The groups were compared regarding their productivity and accuracy of syntactic and agreement categories using the French MOR part-of-speech tagger available from the CHILDES. The groups significantly differed in productivity with respect to nouns, adjectives, determiners, prepositions and gender markers. Error analysis revealed that ASD speakers exhibited a disrupted behaviour in grammatical morphology. They made gender, tense and preposition errors and they omitted determiners and pronouns in nominal and verbal contexts. ASD speakers may have a reduced sensitivity to perceiving and processing the distributional structure of syntactic categories when producing grammatical morphemes and agreement categories. The theoretical and cross-linguistic implications of these findings are discussed.

Previous studies of narrative development based on wordless picture stories indicate that before 7–8 years most children provide descriptive narratives with little inferential content such as explanations and attribution of mental states to the story characters. These components find greater expression in studies where children participated in conversations focused on the causes of the events. In the present study, 84 French-speaking children, from kindergarten to second grade, narrated the Stone story (a wordless five-picture story whose plot is based on a misunderstanding between two characters) before and after a short conversational intervention (SCI) focused on the causes of the events, as well as one week later when they also narrated a new story. Thirty additional children served as the Control group: instead of the SCI they played a Memory game with a set of cards containing the pictures of the Stone story. Children in the SCI group increased the inferential content of the narrative produced after the SCI, thus confirming with a larger sample findings obtained in previous studies. Moreover, results provide new evidence that the immediate improvements in inferential content were still present after a week’s delay and could also be applied to a new story. All narratives produced after the SCI were also longer and contained more markers of causality. The effect was stronger in first and second graders than in kindergarten children. By contrast, no significant improvements were found in the children of the Control group on any of the measures. Such results highlight the effectiveness of the SCI in promoting children’s narrative skills, its usefulness in their assessment, and have important implications for a better understanding of narrative development.

Loin d’etre un phenomene isole, les situations de bilinguisme ou de plurilinguisme representeraient au moins la moitie de la population mondiale. Dans tous les pays d’Europe, le contact avec d’autres cultures et d’autres langues se generalise. Si des retards de langage peuvent apparaitre, ce n’est pas le bilinguisme qui est responsable mais bien souvent la pauvrete et les mauvaises conditions familiales et sociales qui ralentissent le developpement du langage. Cette etude porte sur une cohorte de 22 enfants bilingues et de 43 enfants monolingues âges de 18 a 24 mois : 39 enfants sont issus de milieux favorises et 26 de milieux defavorises. Ces enfants ont ete suivis dans le cadre de la recherche-action Parler bambin sur une periode de six mois dans plusieurs creches de la zone urbaine sensible de Grenoble. Les resultats montrent que le bilinguisme ne constitue pas un risque de retard de langage chez ces enfants mais il peut le devenir comme chez les enfants monolingues qui vivent dans des milieux sociaux defavorises. L’enjeu clinique, pedagogique et social de ces donnees plaide en faveur d’actions de prevention precoce qui ont comme objectif de favoriser l’egalite des chances de tous les enfants du berceau a la creche pour les preparer a l’ecole, puis a la reussite sociale et professionnelle.

In this study, we examined the accuracy of the Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) system in European French. LENA is a digital recording device with software that facilitates the collection and analysis of audio recordings from young children, providing automated measures of the speech overheard and produced by the child. Eighteen native French-speaking children, who were divided into six age groups ranging from 3 to 48 months old, were recorded about 10-16 h per day, three days a week. A total of 324 samples (six 10-min chunks of recordings) were selected and then transcribed according to the CHAT format. Simple and mixed linear models between the LENA and human adult word count (AWC) and child vocalization count (CVC) estimates were performed, to determine to what extent the automatic and the human methods agreed. Both the AWC and CVC estimates were very reliable (r = .64 and .71, respectively) for the 324 samples. When controlling the random factors of participants and recordings, 1 h was sufficient to obtain a reliable sample. It was, however, found that two age groups (7-12 months and 13-18 months) had a significant effect on the AWC data and that the second day of recording had a significant effect on the CVC data. When noise-related factors were added to the model, only a significant effect of signal-to-noise ratio was found on the AWC data. All of these findings and their clinical implications are discussed, providing strong support for the reliability of LENA in French.

International audience; Temporal processing deficit could be associated with a specific difficulty in learning to read. In 1951, Stambak provided preliminary evi- dence that children with dyslexia performed less well than good readers in reproduction of 21 rhythmic patterns. Stambak's task was admi- nistered to 1,028 French children aged 5 – 6 years. The score distribution ( from 0 to 21) was quasi-normal, with some children failing completely and other performing perfectly. In second grade, reading was assessed in 695 of these children. Kindergarten variables explained 26% of the variance of the reading score at second grade. The Stambak score was strongly and linearly related to reading performance in second grade, after partialling out performance on other tasks (oral repetition, attention, and visuo-spatial tasks) and socio-cultural level. Findings are discussed in relation to perceptual, cerebellar, intermodal, and attention-related theories of developmental dyslexia. It is con- cluded that simple rhythm reproduction tasks in kindergarten are predictive of later reading performance.

International audience; In this study, we examined the influence of child gender and sociocultural (SCL) factors in languageproduction. Subjects were French Parisian children in nine age groups (24, 27, 30, 33, 36, 39, 42, 45and 48 months). A total of 316 language samples were recorded during a 20-min standardized playsession. Measures of grammatical and lexical development included Mean Length of Utterance(MLU) and word type and token—specifically, grammatical words such as determiners, prepositionsand pronouns as well as verbs. ANOVAs revealed strong influences of SCL, with children from highSCL families showing more complex lexical productions and a higher rate of development. Theseobservations suggest that amount of exposure to language accounts for this differential rate ofacquisition. Analyses also revealed a general effect of gender, showing a small advantage in languageproduction for girls over boys until 36 months of age.

http://www.vjf.cnrs.fr/umr8606/FichExt/cparisse/JCLchris2000.pdf; International audience; Early morphosyntax is very rich and uniform in French-speaking young children. The present study aims to give a thorough analysis of the morphosyntax produced at the outset of multi-word speech, with a classification of free language produced at 2;0 by 27 French speaking children. The corpus was fully tagged by an automatic part-of-speech tagger. A classification performed with words taken in isolation shows a clear difference between the categories used in single-word utterances and those used in multi-word utterances. A classification performed with word sequences reveals surprisingly adult-like sequences of syntactic categories and words; the non-adult combinations are few in a French child's language.The very successful use of the tagger demonstrates the morphosyntactic coherence of the child's speech. When compared with adult language, the quantitative results, and more precisely the data concerning regularity and error types contribute to the documentation of all the specificities of the emerging morphosyntax in normally developing French children.