Reciprocal influences of learning and language

The main question that will be addressed experimentally in this area is that of the reciprocal influences between learning and language. For example, the use of inner speech (speech that is not spoken aloud) during a learning task is very common and often uncontrollable in tasks of a visual nature.

This phenomenon risks biasing measurements of nonverbal skills (e.g., a nonverbal IQ corresponding to the ability to reason logically). In this context, the objective is to specifically evaluate these subvocal strategies in learning tasks. This work should improve neuropsychological assessment, one of the objectives of which is to clearly distinguish verbal from nonverbal abilities. This is important for populations with impaired verbal abilities (e.g., deaf children, aphasic children), whose scores deviate from the reference population due to an artifact effect.

A second perspective will concern the temporal organization of learning (spacing effect, sleep periods) and its consequences on the acquisition of verbal and/or lexical information. This issue will be addressed from a developmental perspective (children, adults, elderly people) in order to identify the factors that optimize learning for each age group. We will cross-reference this issue with the question of the chunking process, which consists of grouping verbal or nonverbal information into structures that allow for optimal memory organization. We will test which learning session organizations are most appropriate for the formation of memory chunks.

A third perspective will address the role of long-term memory in mother tongue acquisition. One hypothesis is that limitations in long-term memory prevent children from lexicalizing as much as necessary, resulting in the emergence of templates (i.e., language structures that children falsely generalize to produce language). In this context, the particularities of lexical-semantic acquisition in gifted children will be studied by recording evoked potentials (e.g., N400 component). We will seek to show that, while the level of lexical acquisition in intellectually gifted children is above average, their semantic performance is more variable than that of average children, which may explain their particularities in neuropsychological tests.