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In natural settings, listening conditions are seldom optimal. Humans have to distinguish between various simultaneous sounds and focus on the target speech while filtering out irrelevant information. In the presence of background noise, neurotypical adults shift their attention to visual cues and focus more on the nose and mouth area. However, currently, there is no ecological tool available to assess speech perception in noisy environments. This study aims to validate an ecological tool for assessing speech perception in noise among adults. The material comprises 90 videos with 10 speakers introducing themselves in 9 sentences (hobby, favorite dish, pet, etc.). These phrases were randomly assigned across three listening conditions: no background noise, SNR+10 dB, and SNR -10 dB. To validate the material, 44 adults with standard IQ and without neurological, psychiatric, visual, or auditory impairments were recruited.Participants were asked to repeat what they heard after each sentence. Three keywords were created per sentence to obtain a percentage of correctly repeated words. In addition, eye-tracking measures were obtained.We expect speech perception to decrease as the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) decreases. Additionally, attention towards the mouth area is anticipated to increase with lower SNR, while focus on the eye area is expected to decrease.A repeated measures ANOVA revealed a significant effect of noise on the percentage of correctly repeated words, indicating a decrease in speech perception as SNR decreases. Analyses on fixation durations show a significant effect of areas of interest with longer fixation durations on the mouth area. No significant impact of noise on fixation duration was observed. By contrast, a significant interaction effect emerged between areas of interest and level of background noise. Participants showed decreased interest in the eye area and increased focus on the mouth area with lower SNR. Pupillometry analysis shows a significant, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

NA, Doctorat en Sciences psychologiques et de l'éducation, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Introduction: Around 50% of autistic children exhibit a significant language delay, and 30% never develop functional language at all (Tager-Flusberg el al. 2005). In spite of the central place of language in outcome prognostics, the diversity of verbal profiles in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is still ill-understood. Sleep has been shown to plays an active role in language learning by promoting, inter alia, lexical consolidation and integration (Rasch, 2017). There is also growing evidence that maturation of sleep‐wake rhythms and sleep duration in early childhood is a highly predictive factor of later language outcomes. Longitudinal studies show that short nighttime sleep and poor consolidation of sleep-wake rhythms during the first two years of life is correlated with lower expressive vocabulary (Bernier et al. 2010) and communication skills (Smithson et al. 2018). Furthermore, more nighttime sleep relative to daytime sleep between 6 and 36 months of age is predictive of better receptive vocabulary at school entry, thereby underscoring the long term predictive value of the maturation of early sleep patterns (Dionne et al. 2011; Knowland et al. 2021). These findings are promising to understand the different language trajectories observed in ASD as sleep disturbances, including shorter sleep time and irregular sleep–wake rhythms, are atypically frequent (up to 81.5%) and likely to persist across time in ASD (for a review see Deliens et al. 2015). Already present before the age of two (Dewrang and Sandberg, 2010), sleep disturbances were one of the warning signs that brought concern on children development in 64.7 % of the parents of autistic children (Swinkels et al. 2006). Furthermore, the extent of heterogeneity in sleep patterns in autism is comparable to that of linguistic profiles. In this project we aim to test whether early sleep phenotyping in ASD will predict distinct profiles of language development. Methods:300 autistic children aged between 2 and 7 yea, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

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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

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

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

Sleep disturbances are frequent and varied in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Growing evidence suggests that sleep problems in children with ASD are driven by their clinical characteristics and psychiatric comorbidities. Therefore, the wide range of reported sleep disturbances reflects the marked heterogeneity of clinical pictures in ASD. Whether sleep disturbances and their various forms may, in turn, account for at least part of the phenotypical variability of ASD is a crucial question discussed in this review. We first outline studies both validating and challenging a bidirectional theoretical framework for sleep disorders in children with ASD. We then propose to extend this model by including cognition and sensory processing as key factors in the vicious circle linking sleep disorders and autistic symptoms. What this paper adds: There is a bidirectional interplay between autism symptoms and sleep disturbances. Sleep influence on daytime cognitive and sensory skills should be further investigated., SCOPUS: re.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

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Several studies have reported beneficial effects of light exposure to counteract increased sleepiness and decreasing performance. However, little is known about the role of light exposure to prevent decreases of alertness due to high cognitive demands. In the current study, we investigated the effects of bright-light exposure to prevent increases in sleepiness and decreases in alertness induced by a dual working-memory task (TloadDback) in which high cognitive load (HCL) levels can be adapted to the individual’s maximal capacity., SCOPUS: ch.b, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

An ongoing debate in the literature on language acquisition is whether preschool children process reference in an egocentric way or whether they spontaneously and by-default take their partner's perspective into account. The reported study implements a computerized referential task with a controlled trial presentation and simple verbal instructions. Contrary to the predictions of the partner-specific view, entrained referential precedents give rise to faster processing for 3- and 5-year-old children, independently of whether the conversational partner is the same as in the lexical entrainment phase or not. Additionally, both age groups display a processing preference for the interaction with the same partner, be it for new or previously used referential descriptions. These results suggest that preschool children may adapt to their conversational partner; however, partner-specificity is encoded as low-level auditory-phonological priming rather than through inferences about a partner's perspective. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved)., ULBabyLab, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Llewellyn suggests that episodic memories undergo "elaborative encoding” during rapid eye movement (REM) dreams, generating novel associations between recent and remote memories that are then instantiated during non-REM (NREM) sleep. This hypothesis conflicts with our knowledge of the physiology of NREM and then REM sleep stages and their ordered succession. Moreover, associations during sleep might also involve the extraction of hidden patterns rather than de novo associations