The study of discourse is of particular interest for understanding the linguistic and cognitive difficulties of people with neurodegenerative diseases. Analyzing fluency and disfluencies (hesitations, reformulations, interruptions, errors, pauses, prosodic organization) in such studies is particularly crucial since they reflect a good command of language skills and allow us to distinguish between different types of impairments, in particular with regard to primary progressive aphasias (PPA). These are characterized by predominant deficits in language skills and are considered as atypical variants of Alzheimer's disease on the one hand and frontotemporal dementias on the other. A distinction is made between fluent - semantic and logopenic - and non-fluent variants of PPA. In an elderly population with or without neurodegenerative pathology (typical or atypical Alzheimer's disease and front-temporal dementias), this project aims to: 1) characterize the nature of the disfluencies observed during oral production of discourse and during reading; 2) specify the understanding of their neural and cognitive causes according to the type of disorders; 3) investigate the impact of a potential history of oral or written language developmental disorders on their manifestations.

The CLASS project aims to examine the links between the development of intercultural sensitivity and the restructuring of the conceptual system of the second language learner in a migratory context as it manifests itself in the lexicon, the understanding and treatment of figurative expressions, the conceptualization of events and the construction of the narrative. The project is particularly interested in Arabic-speaking refugees or asylum seekers from Syria who are learners of French as a second language at the French university. While being in the field of language acquisition and cognition, it relies on collaboration with experts in intercultural psychology. The project thus aims to develop an innovative multidisciplinary methodology to collect and analyze intercultural, language and eye-tracking data with the aim of characterizing precisely the evolution of the two variables (intercultural sensitivity and restructuring of the conceptual system) through time. The project is innovative in several ways: (i) It focuses on a learner profile that is difficult to access and rarely studied in the field of second language acquisition. The targeted learners, increasingly present on French territory, have an atypical life and training trajectory. (ii) It adopts a recent approach and an innovative methodology allowing to take into account the differences in the learners’ intercultural profiles and the way in which the differences determine or influence second language acquisition. The multidisciplinary methodology will also make it possible to combine qualitative and quantitative data and to gain access, thanks to the technology of eye tracking, to cognitive processing during the performance of language tasks. (iii) It will generate unprecedented longitudinal data whose interpretation and analyses will contribute to a better understanding of language acquisition in a migratory context by disadvantaged learners, a profile largely neglected by second language acquisition research for several decades. Regarding the benefits of the project: (i) Given the lack of work on second culture acquisition and its manifestations at cognitive and language level and the little perspective on language acquisition and conceptual development in a migratory context, the results of the CLASS project will bring new insights into the development of the conceptual system in L2 in general, and that of the Arabic-speaking learner of French L2 in particular. (ii) This research will also make it possible to understand the intercultural trajectories of learners from a culture and L1 that are different from the culture and language of the host society, and who evolve in difficult living conditions with often limited opportunities for interaction in L2. (iii) Finally, the results of the project may ultimately contribute to the design of pedagogical environments and activities allowing the development of intercultural competence and to contribute to the improvement of educational practices with migrant populations. This JCJC project will allow the project leader to consolidate her research on language acquisition by Arabic-speaking migrants within her team. In particular, it will allow her to deepen the issues emanating from the SOFRA project (2018-2020) and to tackle the many scientific obstacles that this research involves, benefiting from different expertise brought by the members of the consortium (in cognitive, acquisitional and intercultural development). Finally, it will allow her to expand her solid experience in the field and the target population, and to generate a substantial body of longitudinal data that can make a real contribution in the field of second language acquisition.

The present project aims at describing the characteristics of the French accentual system in order to bring to light the underlying phonological structure of this language. It addresses the status of the bipolar pattern /IA FA/ (initial accent-final accent), considered as the basic metric pattern in French. An originality of the project is to tackle this question through the combination of two complementary phonological approaches: the autosegmental metrical approach (AM), which largely dominates the description of the prosody of many languages in its tonal aspects; and the metrical and functionalist approach (MF), which not only compensates AM’s lacunae in taking into account the crucial rhythmic aspects of prosody, but also confronts its views on various speaking genres. Such a combination of approaches is necessary to account for the specificity of French prosody, still too often viewed as a ‘language without accent’ or a ‘boundary language’. Our main proposition consists of the dissociation between boundary and prominence phenomena, allowing us to encompass the complexity of the rules underlying the occurrence of the bipolar pattern /IA FA/. We propose to apply the same analyses to different corpora, from laboratory speech to semi-controlled speech and dialogic spontaneous interaction. Production and perception experiments (behavioural and using brain imaging (EEG) techniques) will allow us to show that the bipolar pattern has a phonological reality in French, that it is both produced and perceived, and that it resists to the numerous sources of variability inherent to each speaking genre. We wish to concentrate our investigation more particularly on IA, which is less described than FA in French, in order to show that it plays a fundamental role in speech structuring, speech segmentation and lexical access. The production studies will allow us to refine the acoustic-phonetic characterization of IA and FA, with potential application to automatic detection of prosodic cues on large, spontaneous corpora. The choice of the present project’s consortium is particularly sensible insofar as it brings together experts on each discipline (linguistics and psycholinguistics) and each approach (laboratory phonology, corpora analysis, etc.). This consortium will allow for the emergence of a new vision of French prosody, totally in phase with current international debates on the merging between the phonological approach – restricted up to now to laboratory speech – and those approaches underlying the investigation of large speech corpora. The MF approach defended by the leader of the project thus brings an essential contribution onto the international scene, through two main aspects. First, it accounts for speech invariants through the study of speaking genres’ variability. Second, it echoes the current international debates on the necessity to go past the sole description of tonal levels, which AM relies on. The MF approach brings to the fore the metrical and rhythmical dimensions of speech, which are as central to the prosodic description of a language as the tonal dimension.

Corpuses of environmental sounds are heavily used for scientific studies on human perception as well as a raw material for the creation of immersive soundscape for sound artists (immersive universe, video games …). The use of such corpus faces two major drawbacks. On one hand the annotation being a very tricky task with very few standards, it is difficult for scientists to disseminate corpuses, exchange data with peers or even search for existing corpuses and for specific sounds. On the other hand, existing corpuses does not always meet user needs. Project CIESS, "Creation, Indexing and Enrichment of a corpus of environmental Sounds" aims to provide practical solutions and guidelines for creating, using and adapting such corpus. This ambitious project will create a strong interaction between the fields of perception, analysis and sound synthesis. These three components, rarely associated, are indeed necessary to grasps the whole complexity behind the creation and the use of specific sound corpuses. CIESS has a systemic approach considering the problem in its entirety and brings together three partners specialized respectively in each of these areas: · OCTOGNE (PETRA) laboratory · IRIT laboratory, · AUDIOGAMMING, a young innovative company supported by incubator Midi-Pyrénées and two-times laureate of French Ministry of research and industry innovation contest. CIESS will produce two major deliverables: On one hand a corpus of environmental sounds thoroughly annotated and available to scientific communities as well as industrials and made available through the “Grand Equipement” program (TGE) ADONIS. On the other hand CIESS will deliver the very first mock-up of a corpus enrichment framework. This framework will make use of automatic sound analysis tools as well as sound synthesis tools created specifically for that purpose. The OCTOGONE-PETRA laboratory will coordinate this development through an iterative process, in order to meet the requirements of perceptual studies. IRIT will develop robust tools adapted to the high constraints of sound captured in real-life uncontrolled conditions. These tools allow the annotation of sound events, as well as the identification and computation of acoustic descriptors relevant to perceptual criteria studied. AUDIOGAMMING, specialized in sound design and sound synthesis, will create the framework and the synthesis tools for the corpus enrichment. This framework is intended to act and to directly modify/enrich the sound events using automatic and perceptual annotations. These enrichments will be based on perceptual criteria established by OCTOGONE-PETRA laboratory. Steps have been planned throughout the project to test the robustness and efficiency of developed tools.

Specific learning and developmental disorders are one of the major causes of school failure among children with psychological and social implications. Developmental Dyslexia (DYS) and Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) are common reasons for child out-patient paediatric consultation. Their frequent association however suggests the existence of a common etiology. The hypothesis of a procedural learning and memory deficit in both disorders, as proposed by Nicolson and Fawcett (2007) assumes the existence of a dysfunction of the neural bases of procedural learning, namely cortico-striatal and cortico-cerebellar loops, distinctly recruited depending on the type of task and learning phase. A still open question is to what extent are these loops defective in DYS and DCD: are they “disorder-specific”, or do they constitute a common grounding? This issue stands for a real theoretical challenge given the contradictory findings reported in the recent literature. This research project aims at studying procedural learning and memory in children with a specific developmental disorder (DYS or DCD) or with both types of deficits (DYS and DCD). A comparison with a control group, consisting of typically developing children, will able us to dissociate the supposed procedural difficulties (learning and memory) that are specific and/or common to DYS and/or DCD. A second control group will involve children with reading and motor learning disabilities due to a genetic disorder, i.e. Neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1). Comparing these different groups constitute the first novelty in our approach. The second aim is to further investigate the deficits according to the procedural task at stake. According to Doyon and Benali (2005), sequence learning recruits the cortico-striatal loop while perceptual-motor adaptations mainly involve the cortico-cerebellar loop. Each type of learning may imply motor or verbal processes (input or response). Therefore, six behavioural tasks will test different combinations of circuit/processes. DYS, DCD and NF1 children should have common or specific learning and retention deficits according to the proposed combination. This stands for another originality of our proposal. The last objective is to determine cognitive and neural predictive markers of learning and its immediate and long-term retention efficiency. Cognitive markers will be obtained in a comprehensive neuropsychological assessment. MRI data (DTI, resting-state and morphometry) will give us information about the cerebral architecture and connectivity. A complementary goal will be to analyse correlations between cerebral and cognitive measures obtained during neuropsychological assessments as well as experimental tasks. This last part of the project represents quite an original method. This innovative project brings together researchers from complementary scientific backgrounds (linguistics, sports sciences, developmental psychology, neuroscience) from two research sites (Toulouse and Marseille) whose research interests are close. The different partners have already obtained preliminary data, suggesting the existence of a common aetiology to DYS and DCD and strengthening hypotheses on which this research is based on. The project will provide new theoretical insights into common and distinct deficits observed in children with DYS and DCD and will allow new opportunities for assessing procedural deficits. Finally, being able to precise failure predictors may offer us to propose new evidence-based training programmes targeted on learning deficits in the different population.