Successful word recognition requires that listeners attend to differences that are phonemic in the language while also remaining flexible to the variation introduced by different voices and accents. Previous work has demonstrated that American-English-learning 19-month-olds are able to balance these demands: although one-off one-feature…

Purpose: Phonological complexity is known to be a good index of developmental language disorder (DLD) in normal-hearing children, who have major difficulties on some complex structures. Some deaf children with cochlear implants (CIs) present a profile that evokes DLD, with persistent linguistic difficulties despite good audiological and…

Drawing from a "constructivist" approach, this qualitative research presents results of teaching the Doctoral English Course (DEC) at the Center for Languages (CDL), University Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis. The DEC aims to train doctoral candidates in the practice of scientific communication in English. By allowing students to (re)think…

We describe here strategies inspired by translation studies and implemented in a bilingual translation class pairing two student groups of native speakers of English (from Barnard College, Columbia University) and of French (from the École Normale Supérieure, Lyon). Student e-tandems use CMC (computer mediated communication) to collaborate on the…

How do children infer the meaning of a word? Current accounts of word learning assume that children expect a word to map onto exactly one concept whose members form a coherent category. If this assumption was strictly true, children should infer that a homophone, such as "bat," refers to a single superordinate category that encompasses…

This chapter focuses on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on language classes in a Paris university in 2020. The first case studied is a Master of Arts (MA) class in translation studies. The forced and sudden switch to online learning was well accepted by students who cooperated with the academic staff to choose an online platform, in the…

Questions, just like plain declarative sentences, can give rise to multiple interpretations. As discussed by Spector & Egré (2015), among others, questions embedded under know are ambiguous between "weakly exhaustive" (WE), "intermediate exhaustive" (IE), and "strongly exhaustive" (SE) interpretations (for…

The left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) is crucially has been found to be involved in syntactic processing of various kinds. This study investigates the cortical effects of two types of syntactic processes: (i) Reconstruction in ellipsis (recovery of left-out material given by context, "More people have been to Paris than" [...] "to…

Logic has been intertwined with the study of language and meaning since antiquity, and such connections persist in present day research in linguistic theory (formal semantics) and cognitive psychology (e.g., studies of human reasoning). However, few studies in cognitive neuroscience have addressed logical dimensions of sentence-level language…