Clément François

CNRS

Speech and co‐speech gestures always go hand in hand. Whether we find the precursors of these co‐speech gestures in infants before they master their native language still remains an open question. Except for deictic gestures, there is little agreement on the existence of iconic, non‐referential and conventional gestures before children start produc...

Little is known about language development after late‐to‐moderate premature birth, the most significant part of prematurity worldwide. We examined minimal‐pair word‐learning skills in 18 eighteen‐month‐old healthy full‐term (mean gestational age [GA] at birth = 39.6 weeks; 7 males; 100% Caucasian) and 18 healthy late‐to‐moderate preterm infants (me...

Despite shared procedures with adults, electroencephalography (EEG) in early development presents many specificities that need to be considered for good quality data collection. In this paper, we provide an overview of the most representative early cognitive developmental EEG studies focusing on the specificities of this neuroimaging technique in y...

When learning a new language, one must segment words from continuous speech and associate them with meanings. These complex processes can be boosted by attentional mechanisms triggered by multi-sensory information. Previous electrophysiological studies suggest that brain oscillations are sensitive to different hierarchical complexity levels of the...

Statistical learning has been proposed as a mechanism to structure and segment the continuous flow of information in several sensory modalities. Previous studies proposed that the medial temporal lobe, and in particular the hippocampus, may be crucial to parse the stream in the visual modality. However, the involvement of the hippocampus in auditor...

While a growing body of literature exists on initial word-to-meaning mapping and retrieval of fully lexicalized words, our understanding on the learning of semantic knowledge that occurs between these two stages remains limited. The current study investigated the neural correlates of retrieving newly learned word meanings using oscillatory brain dy...

Children with left perinatal arterial ischemic stroke (PAIS) often exhibit language and cognitive deficits. However, evaluations of language learning abilities are very scarce. Here, we compared word-referent associative learning and recall performance (immediate and delayed) using a fast-mapping (FM) paradigm in a group of 3.5-year-old children wi...

Speech and co-speech gestures always go hand in hand. Whether we find the precursors of these co-speech gestures in infants before they master their native language still remains an open question. Except for deictic gestures, there is little agreement on the existence of iconic, non-referential and symbolic gestures before children start producing...

Background: More than half of infants with complex congenital heart disease (CHD) will have a neurodevelopmental disorder of multifactorial causes. The preoperative period represents a time-window during which neonates with complex CHD are in a state of hypoxia and hemodynamic instability, which fosters the emergence of brain injuries and, thus, af...

Statistical learning has been proposed as a mechanism to structure and segment the continuous flow of information in several sensory modalities. Previous studies proposed that the medial temporal lobe, and in particular the hippocampus, may be crucial to parse the stream in the visual modality. However, the involvement of the hippocampus in auditor...

Good Scientific Practice (GSP) refers to both explicit and implicit rules, recommendations, and guidelines that help scientists to produce work that is of the highest quality at any given time, and to efficiently share that work with the community for further scrutiny or utilization. For experimental research using magneto- and electroencephalograp...

Good Scientific Practice (GSP) refers to both explicit and implicit rules or guidelines that help scientists to produce work that is of the highest quality at any given time, and to efficiently share that work with the community for further scrutiny or utilization. For experimental research using magneto- and electroencephalography (MEEG), GSP inc...

The learning of new words is a challenge that accompanies human beings throughout the entire life span. Although the main electrophysiological markers of word learning have already been described, little is known about the performance-dependent neural machinery underlying this exceptional human faculty. Furthermore, it is currently unknown how word...

Humans continuously learn new information. Here, we examined the temporal brain dynamics of explicit verbal associative learning between unfamiliar items. In the first experiment, 25 adults learned object-pseudoword associations during a 5-day training program allowing us to track the N400 dynamics across learning blocks within and across days. Suc...

The mismatch negativity (MMN) is an event related brain potential (ERP) elicited by unpredicted sounds presented in a sequence of repeated auditory stimuli. The neural sources of the MMN have been previously attributed to a fronto-temporo-parietal network which crucially overlaps with the so-called auditory dorsal stream, involving inferior and mid...

Brain imaging methods such as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) have already been used to decipher the functional and structural brain changes occurring during normal language development. However, little is known about the differentiation of the language network after an early lesion. While in adults,...

Recent findings have revealed that very preterm neonates already show the typical brain responses to place of articulation changes in stop consonants, but data on their sensitivity to other types of phonetic changes remains scarce. Here, we examined the impact of 7‐8 weeks of extra‐uterine life on the automatic processing of syllables in 20 healthy...

Brain imaging methods have contributed to shed light on the mechanisms of recovery after early brain insult. The assumption that the unaffected right hemisphere can take over language functions after left perinatal stroke is still under debate. Here, we report how patterns of brain structural and functional reorganization were associated with langu...

Previous results showed a positive influence of music training on linguistic abilities at both attentive and preattentive levels. Here, we investigate whether six months of active music training is more efficient than painting training to improve the preattentive processing of phonological parameters based on durations that are often impaired in ch...

In the present study, we aimed to test the association between the correct function of the left ventral white matter pathways and semantic processing (dual stream models for language processing, Hickok & Poeppel, 2004), using a new set of language tasks during intraoperative electrical stimulation at white matter level. Additionally, we evaluated b...

The present study investigated whether children with developmental dyslexia showed specific deficits in the perception of three phonetic features (voicing, place, and manner of articulation) in optimal (silence) and degraded listening conditions (envelope-coded speech versus noise), using both standard behavioral and electrophysiological measures....

Music learning has received increasing attention in the last decades due to the variety of functions and brain plasticity effects involved during its practice. Most previous reports interpreted the differences between music experts and laymen as the result of training. However, recent investigations suggest that these differences are due to a combi...

Word learning constitutes a human faculty which is dependent upon two anatomically distinct processing streams projecting from posterior superior temporal (pST) and inferior parietal (IP) brain regions toward the prefrontal cortex (dorsal stream) and the temporal pole (ventral stream). The ventral stream is involved in mapping sensory and phonologi...

This chapter reviews electrophysiological studies on early word-form segmentation and word-referent mapping, with a focus on the role of prosody in these early abilities closely related to vocabulary acquisition. First, we will review event-related brain potential (ERP) studies on word segmentation showing the impact of lexical stress cues, infant-...

The capacity to respond to novel events is crucial for adapting to the constantly changing environment. Here, we recorded 29-channel Event Related Brain Potentials (ERPs) during an active auditory novelty oddball paradigm and used for the first time Current Source Density-transformed Event Related Brain Potentials and associated time-frequency spec...

Words and melodies are some of the basic elements infants are able to extract early in life from the auditory input. Whether melodic cues contained in songs can facilitate word-form extraction immediately after birth remained unexplored. Here, we provided converging neural and computational evidence of the early benefit of melodies for language acq...

In the present study we studied the electrophysiological correlates of the crossmodal correspondence between pitch and spatial elevation. We aimed at exploring how automatic this correspondence is. We expected to find some event-related potentials (ERPs) that would be sensitive to an incongruence between a spatial position and a sound of a certain...

François, C., Schön, D. (2011). Musical expertise boosts implicit learning of both musical and linguistic structures. Cerebral Cortex. 21(10): 2357-2365. François, C., Chobert, J., Besson, M., Schön, D. (2013). Musical training for the development of speech segmentation. Cerebral Cortex. 23(9): 2038-2043. François, C., Jaillet, F., Takerkart, S., S...

In this chapter, we summarize the main results of a line of research whereby a comparative approach to language and music is adopted in order to better understand the functional architecture of the human brain. Although the comparison between language and music has not been one of Jean-Luc Nespoulous' primary scientific interests, he has always bee...

In the last decade, important advances in the field of cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience have largely contributed to improve our knowledge on brain functioning. More recently, a line of research has been developed that aims at using musical training and practice as alternative tools for boosting specific perceptual, motor, cognitive,...

The present study investigated whether a temporal hierarchical structure favors implicit learning. An artificial pitch grammar implemented with a set of tones was presented in two different temporal contexts, notably with either a strongly metrical structure or an isochronous structure. According to the Dynamic Attending Theory, external temporal r...

The musician's brain is considered as a good model of brain plasticity as musical training is known to modify auditory perception and related cortical organization. Here, we show that music-related modifications can also extend beyond motor and auditory processing and generalize (transfer) to speech processing. Previous studies have shown that adul...

Musical training has been shown to positively influence linguistic abilities. To follow the developmental dynamics of this transfer effect at the preattentive level, we conducted a longitudinal study over 2 school years with nonmusician children randomly assigned to music or to painting training. We recorded the mismatch negativity (MMN), a cortica...

The role of music training in fostering brain plasticity and developing high cognitive skills, notably linguistic abilities, is of great interest from both a scientific and a societal perspective. Here, we report results of a longitudinal study over 2 years using both behavioral and electrophysiological measures and a test-training-retest procedure...

Both speech and music are constituted by sequences of sound elements that unfold in time and require listeners to engage cognitive functions such as sequencing, attention, and memory. We recently ran a set of experiments with the aim of testing the effect of musical expertise on a rather high cognitive function: speech segmentation. Here, we will p...

The aim of this study was to examine the influence of musical expertise in 9-year-old children on passive (as reflected by MMN) and active (as reflected by discrimination accuracy) processing of speech sounds. Musician and nonmusician children were presented with a sequence of syllables that included standards and deviants in vowel frequency, vowel...

Adults and infants can use the statistical properties of syllable sequences to extract words from continuous speech. Here we present a review of a series of electrophysiological studies investigating (1) Speech segmentation resulting from exposure to spoken and sung sequences (2) The extraction of linguistic versus musical information from a sung s...

Musical training is known to modify auditory perception and related cortical organization. Here, we show that these modifications may extend to higher cognitive functions and generalize to processing of speech. Previous studies have shown that adults and newborns can segment a continuous stream of linguistic and nonlinguistic stimuli based only on...

To learn a new language, it is necessary for the learner to succeed in segmenting the continuous stream of sounds into significant units. Previous behavioral studies have shown that it is possible to segment a language or musical stream based only on probabilities of occurrence between adjacent syllables/tones. Here we used a sung language and test...