Real-time phonological, semantic, and syntactic processing

The organizing principle behind this line of research is the study of real-time language comprehension processes. The approach is inherently interdisciplinary and involves morphological, phonological, semantic, and syntactic analysis of language, as well as experimental testing of real-time integration processes at these different levels. The dichotic listening paradigm aims to identify whether the division of words into pieces (morphemes) made by linguists corresponds to the pieces actually stored in long-term memory (lexicon) and used in real time during word construction by morpho-phonological computation. An fMRI pilot study was conducted in Besançon in 2014. There will be a non-invasive EEG component (London) and an invasive component (UFR de Médecine), as well as a behavioral test of the experimental protocol (reaction time).

Semantic priming methods, eye movement recording during reading, and EEG recording will be used to highlight semantic and syntactic priming processes during sentence comprehension. The real-time integration of word and sentence meaning will be studied in adults in written form in normal situations or in spoken form in noisy situations, as well as in gifted children. The effects of semantic and syntactic factors will be studied simultaneously in relation to the concepts of word entropy in texts, calculated on the basis of large text corpora in collaboration with the Logometry team. More specific aspects of the cognitive processing of grammatical morphemes without phonetic realization on nouns and verbs and of interrogative structures will also be studied experimentally. Semantic processing will be modeled using biologically inspired neural networks of the cerebral cortex.