Identifying drivers of language change using neural agent-based models. Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Agent-based ...
The relevance of the study of Latin & Greek (L&G) in secondary education is being questioned more and more. Proponents have claimed that it greatly improves linguistic abilities and even cognition beyond the linguistic domain, e.g. analytical thinking. Numerous American scholars have set up field tests, but they focused on the influence of Latin on English vocabulary acquisition by native speakers. Moreover, these studies all lack a ...
This project will investigate how complex language is acquired. We will focus on how children, in their first language acquisition, produce and understand meaning making use of complex form (syntax), pronunciation (prosody) and discourse context. To this extent, we will analyze the emergence and development of two types of “cleft sentences” (1-2) in French, with children between ages 2 and 8. (1) Child (age 2;9): C'est toi qui m(e) fait les ...
The majority of children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) display a significant language delay,which may be resorbed to varying extents between 2 and 7 an autistic child will develop language. Language development in ASD is usually conceived as depending on the improvement of socio-communicative skills,much as in typically developing children. However, there are reasons to believe that in some children on the autism spectrum ...
More than 1 million Europeans suffer a stroke each year, and one third of them is faced with aphasia, i.e. a language disorder with heterogeneous language profiles, varying in the degree to which each component of the language processing chain (i.e. auditory, phonological, semantic and syntactic processing) is affected. Although a reliable detection and in-depth characterization of the affected component is vital for targeted intervention, ...
Can we determine, from someone's brain activity, whether speech is heard or understood? This is the central question of this doctoral thesis. Speech is way more than a random collection of sounds. It consists of specific sounds, making up words that form sentences to convey a message that one can understand.
To find the answer to this question, we focused on a phenomenon called neural speech tracking. When someone hears speech, their ...