Towards a dynamical approach to spoken language development
11h-12h30
MSH, salle Elise Rivet
Conférence de :
Aude Noiray(Université Potsdam, Allemagne)
dans le cadre DENDY
Spoken communication is a biological behavior emerging very early in development and
effortlessly in most children. It is shaped by multi-faceted developments in the speech
motor, perception, lexical and phonological domains, which develop in a seemingly parallel
fashion. While most of those competences have been well studied in the last decades,
developmental interactions between domains have typically been conducted in separate
strands. Yet, findings suggest they interact dynamically over time.
In this presentation, I will first discuss research conducted with colleagues addressing the
development of coarticulation in young children and show that while the maturation of the
speech motor system is certainly crucial to spoken language fluency, the concurrent
development of other skills must be considered to explain children’s individual trajectories.
I will then present recent research illuminating non-monotonic interactions between the
motor, lexical and phonological domains from the preschool age to the beginning of
primary school. Last, I will introduce preliminary results suggesting an early interaction
between infants’ attention to linguistically relevant orofacial information and their vocal
repertoire. Altogether, the findings motivate an integrated approach of spoken language
development in which various skills are envisioned as interacting dynamically over time and
are fundamental to the growth of each of them.