Typologie d'actualités: acquisition

Difficulties in learning specialty vocabulary at school: the case of opaque verbs

We are pleased to announce the publication of the latest article by Núria Gala and Marie-Noëlle Roubaud, two AMU senior lecturers at the LPL, in collaboration with Ludivine Javourey-Drevet of the SCALab (Villeneuve d'Ascq) in the journal “Lexique”:

Reference: Núria Gala, Marie-Noëlle Roubaud, Ludivine Javourey-Drevet. La difficulté d'apprentissage du vocabulaire de spécialité à l'école: le cas des verbes opaques. Lexique, July 2024, 34. ⟨hal-04580153⟩

Full-text article (in French): https://www.peren-revues.fr/lexique/1727

Abstract:
This work has been carried out with the aim of shedding light on the lexical knowledge of middle-school learners regarding vocabulary from domain-specific texts. We analyse a series of opaque verbs (polysemous, frequent in history and science textbooks) and we draw up an assessment of the lexical knowledge of 219 children from grades 4 and 5 (aged 9 to 11) in different schools in France. We also show the strategies used by learners to respond to the proposed task of writing a sentence with a given verb out of context.

 

Crédits d’image : Drazen Zigic sur Freepik

 

Phonological Decoding and Morpho-Orthographic Decomposition: Complementary Routes During Learning to Read

We are pleased to announce the publication by Brice Brossette - as first author in collaboration with other researchers - of a new article in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology:

Reference: Brice Brossette, Élise Lefèvre, Elisabeth Beyersmann, Eddy Cavalli, Jonathan Grainger, Bernard Lété. Phonological Decoding and Morpho-Orthographic Decomposition: Complementary Routes During Learning to Read. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2024, 242, ⟨10.31234/osf.io/qeynj⟩. ⟨hal-04421017v2⟩

Full text article: https://hal.science/hal-04421017v2

Brice is a post-doctoral fellow at the LPL within the framework of the AMPIRIC-funded DREAM project, which aims to gain a better understanding of the factors involved in children's exposure to the written word in the first year of primary school, in order to develop a programme of personalised recommendations for learning to read. He coordinates this project together with Stéphanie Ducrot (LPL/CNRS).

 

Photo de Michał Parzuchowski sur Unsplash

What role does grammatical gender play in acquisition of L2 vocabulary?

We are pleased to announce the publication of the article Cross-linguistic gender congruency effects during lexical access in novice L2 learners: evidence from ERPs co-written by Ana Zappa, Deirdre Bolger and Cheryl Frenck-Mestre (LPL/ILCB) in collaboration with Daniel Mestre and Jean-Marie Pergandi from ISM/CRVM.

 Reference:
Ana Zappa, Daniel Mestre, Jean-Marie Pergandi, Deirdre Bolger, Cheryl Frenck-Mestre. Cross-linguistic gender congruency effects during lexical access in novice L2 learners: evidence from ERPs. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, Taylor and Francis, In press, ⟨10.1080/23273798.2022.2039726⟩. ⟨hal-03599139⟩

Full text on open science database HAL: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/LPL-AIX/hal-03599139v1

Contact: ana.zappa@univ-amu.fr

The role of emotions in learning abstract words

As part of the CNRS 80|Prime call, funding for the PhD project led by Johannes Ziegler (LPC) and Núria Gala (LPL) has been selected among the 2021 laureates! 

Project title: The role of semantic neighborhoods and emotion in the learning of abstract words: from embodied linguistic theory to classroom interventions (LAW)

A boost for research on child language

In the beautiful series of project funding approved in 2020/2021, we are pleased to present two contracts dedicated to the acquisition and development of language in babies:

Coordinated by Clément François, the research project "BabyLang: Children's speech perception and vocabulary acquisition" was selected by the ANR within the framework of the JCJC 2020 call for projects. This project aims to study hierarchy learnings underlying language acquisition in term babies and premature babies. It will provide a better understanding of (i) the mechanisms of cerebral plasticity underlying the emergence of phonological categories, (ii) the links between early perception of speech and the ability to learn new words, (iv) the impact of 'premature birth on these processes, and (iv) identification of early biomarkers of later language skills.

The research project "LangDev: From speech perception in babies to vocabulary acquisition in children, an interdisciplinary project", coordinated by Laurent Prévot and Clément François, was funded within the framework of the call for projects 80 Prime du CNRS. It aims to determine how the development of the encoding of speech sounds influences the emergence of conceptual and lexical representations in babies. In addition, Estelle Hervé, winner of the doctoral scholarship associated with the project, joined the project team at the end of 2020.

Image by Andi Graf of Pixabay

From lip- to script-reading: new ANR contract awarded

The LPL is pleased to announce that the project "From lip- to script-reading: An integrative view of audio-visual associations in language processing" (AVA), submitted by Chotiga Pattamadilok, LPL researcher, was validated in the framework of the last ANR PRC selection.

Summary:
The early exposure to speech and speakers’ articulatory gestures is the basis of language acquisition and is a fingerprint of audiovisual association learning. Is this initial ability to associate speech sounds and visual inputs a precursor of infants’ reading ability? Answering this question requires a good understanding of the cognitive/neural bases of both language abilities and whether they interact within the language system. Studies comparing task performance and spatio-temporal dynamics of brain activity associated with these abilities will be conducted. At the theoretical level, the outcome should lead to an elaboration of a unified framework explaining how multi-modal inputs jointly contribute to form a coherent language representation. At the practical level, the new perspective of a link between the developmental trajectories of “lip-reading” and “script-reading” should contribute to language learning and facilitate early detection and remediation of reading deficits.

Partners:
Laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-Marseille Univ. (coordinator)
Laboratoire D'Etude des Mécanismes Cognitifs, Univ. Lyon 2
Laboratoire de Psychologie et NeuroCognition, Univ. Grenoble Alpes
SFR Santé Lyon-Est, Univ. Lyon 1