Search

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

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.