jean-luc Velay

• Researcher at French National Centre for Scientific Research; Marseille

Les enfants à haut potentiel intellectuel (HPI) peuvent avoir des troubles d’écriture. Ce phénomène crée de nombreux mythes sur les performances manuscrites de ces enfants. Nous avons étudié les spécificités de l’écriture des enfants HPI non dysgraphiques et les avons comparées à des témoins non-HPI du même âge. Nos résultats ne démontrent pas une...

Résumé L’étude de la graphonomie (Graphonomics) dans le domaine du langage écrit est le pendant de l’étude de la parole dans le domaine du langage oral. Mais contrairement à la parole où le processus de production sonore caractérise la performance, la performance d’écriture s’étudie à partir de l’analyse conjointe du produit, c’est-à-dire de la tra...

Despite the abundant literature on intelligence and high potential individuals, there is still a lack of international consensus on the terminology and clinical characteristics associated to this population. It has been argued that unstandardized use of diagnosis tools and research methods make comparisons and interpretations of scientific and epid...

Biscriptuality is the ability to read and write using two scripts. Despite the increasing number of biscripters, this phenomenon remains poorly understood. Here, we focused on investigating graphomotor processing in French-Arabic biscripters. We chose the French and Arabic alphabets because they have comparable visuospatial complexity and linguisti...

Biscriptuality is the ability to write in two different writing systems. The aim of this study was to examine the effects of biscriptuality on graphomotor coordination dynamics in right-handed adults. Thirty-four French monoscriptuals and 34 French-Arabic biscriptual participants traced series of loops in two writing directions and in two direction...

We investigated the combined effects of orthographic and graphomotor constraints as a function of handwriting proficiency in children. Twenty-four first graders, 20 third graders, and 21 fifth graders wrote single five-letter words in cursive writing on a sheet of paper affixed to a digitizing tablet. The words were chosen according to two orthogra...

We investigated the combined effects of orthographic and graphomotor constraints as a function of handwriting proficiency in children. Twenty-four first graders, 20 third graders, and 21 fifth graders wrote single five-letter words in cursive writing on a sheet of paper affixed to a digitizing tablet. The words were chosen according to two orthogra...

Abstract An assessment-related stress is an object of interest of both educational and neurobiological research. In educational literature “feeling stressed” is measured by self-reports and mostly in the situation of high-stakes examinations before and after exam. In neurophysiological research “acute stress” is laboratory observed through controll...

Introduction Although the motor signs of Parkinson’s disease (PD) are well defined, nonmotor symptoms, including higher-level language deficits, have also been shown to be frequent in patients with PD. In the present study, we used a lexical decision task (LDT) to find out whether access to the mental lexicon is impaired in patients with PD, and wh...

While the brain network supporting handwriting has previously been defined in adults, its organization in children has never been investigated. We compared the handwriting network of 23 adults and 42 children (8 to 11 year old). Participants were instructed to write the alphabet, the days of the week and to draw loops while being scanned. The handw...

A growing number of studies postulate the use of music to improve motor control in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). The effects of music are greatly variable from one individual to the other and do not always reach the expected benefits. This study aimed to optimize the use of music in the management of movement disorders inherent to PD in a...

Developmental dyslexia is a long-lasting reading deficit that persists into adulthood. In spite of many difficulties, some adults with dyslexia reach levels of reading comprehension similar to those of unimpaired readers and successfully study at university. While digital technologies offer many potential tools to facilitate reading, there are diff...

Developmental coordination disorder (DCD) is a common and well-recognized neurodevelopmental disorder affecting approximately 5 in every 100 individuals worldwide. It has long been included in standard national and international classifications of disorders (especially the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). Children and adults...

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...

Digital reading devices such as Kindle differ from paper books with respect to the kinesthetic and tactile feedback provided to the reader, but the role of these features in reading is rarely studied empirically. This experiment compares reading of a long text on Kindle DX and in print. Fifty participants (24 years old) read a 28 page (∼1 h reading...

Academic performance gradually becomes the main concern at school and is thoroughly measured by a school assessment which turns to be the source of constant judgment and jeopardizes children’s well-being. In this article, we tackle the notion of exam stress in order to better understand this phenomenon and to renew the ways to study it, facing a re...

Music has been shown to enhance motor control in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). Notably, musical rhythm is perceived as an external auditory cue that helps PD patients to better control movements. The rationale of such effects is that motor control based on auditory guidance would activate a compensatory brain network that minimizes the re...

Current models of writing assume that the orthographic processes involved in spelling retrieval and the motor processes involved in the control of the hand are independent. This view has been challenged by behavioral studies, which showed that the linguistic features of words impact motor execution during handwriting. We designed an experiment coup...

Music has been shown to enhance motor control in patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD). Notably, musical rhythm is perceived as an external auditory cue that helps PD patients to better control movements. The rationale of such effects is that motor control based on auditory guidance would activate a compensatory brain network that minimizes the re...

In order to improve educational research focusing especially on such complex themes as the influence of emotions on the learning processes in class, collaboration between Educational studies and Neurosciences appears particularly relevant. However, the road to such interdisciplinary research is full of potholes and obstacles. They are particularly...

One of the current scientific challenges is to propose novel tools and tasks designed to identify new motor biomarkers in Parkinson's disease (PD). Among these, a focus has placed on drawing tasks. Independently from clinical ratings, this study aimed to evaluate the pen movement and holding in digitalized spiral drawing in individuals with PD with...

In Lebanon, children learn to write two graphic systems (Arabic and Latin) at the age of five. This phenomenon of dual learning of graphical systems - or bigraphism - makes the handwriting situation complex. Indeed, in view of the differences between the Arabic and Latin scripts (direction of writing, character's form ..) the required motor program...

Background: Developmental dyslexia is a long-lasting reading deficit that persists into adulthood. In spite of many difficulties, some dyslexic adults reach levels of reading comprehension similar to those of unimpaired readers and successfully study at university. Digital technologies offer many potential tools to facilitate reading, but reading...

La musique peut-elle faciliter l’apprentissage de l’écriture ? Pendant 12 séances, dont 6 avec une musique de fond, nous avons proposé des exercices graphomoteurs à un enfant de 6 ans en grande difficulté d’écriture. À l’issue des séances avec musique, nous avons observé une amélioration significative de la durée, la vitesse et la fluidité du mouve...

Can music facilitate learning to write? During 12 sessions, including 6 with a background music, a 6-year-old child with a poor handwriting was trained to write between two tests. Results revealed that handwriting velocity and movement fluency were higher after training with music. This study confirms the potential of training with music for handwr...

This review focuses on the acquisition of writing motor aspects in adults, and in 5-to 12-year-old children without learning disabilities. We first describe the behavioural aspects of adult writing and dominant models based on the notion of motor programs. We show that handwriting acquisition is characterized by the transition from reactive movemen...

While there is a long history and tradition of behavioral research on basic motor skills in Down syndrome (DS), there has been only limited research on handwriting ability. We analyzed the spatiotemporal features of handwriting produced by children and adults with DS (n = 24), and compared their productions with those of comparison groups matched f...

Sonifying handwriting, i.e. transforming some characteristics of handwriting movement into sounds, aims to improve handwriting perception, evaluation, and control. The educative or clinical interest is to make hidden variables of handwriting, which are not accessible through a visual inspection of the trace, perceptible and useful for novice or poo...

The aim of this study was to evaluate the compensatory effects of real-time auditory feedback on two proprioceptively deafferented subjects. The real-time auditory feedback was based on a movement sonification approach, consisting of translating some movement variables into synthetic sounds to make them audible. The two deafferented subjects and 16...

Example of sonified handwriting of a deafferented subject (IW) in eight reproductions of a character during training session with sonification.

Presentation of the four characters written by the two deafferented subjects (GL and IW) in the pre-test (PRE), in the short-term post-tests following the training phases (POST ST) and in the long-term post-test (POST LT). The characters learned with sonification just before the POST ST are surrounded.

We examined the implication of training modality on the cortical representation of Chinese words in adult learners of Chinese. In particular, we tested the implication of the neural substrates of writing in a reading task. The brain network sustaining finger writing was defined neuroanatomically based on an independent functional localizer, and bra...

- In this article, we present recent neuroimaging studies performed to identify the neural network involved in handwriting. These studies, carried out in adults and in children, suggest that the mastery of handwriting is based on the involvement of a network of brain structures whose involvement and inter-connection are specific to writing alphabet...

The massive shift of writing habits calls for a better understanding of the possible consequences of typing practice on language processing, including reading. To assess a possible impact of typing knowledge on word recognition, we built a set of words and pseudowords differing by their ratio of bimanual transitions between letters, an index of typ...

Learning to read involves setting up associations between meaningless visual inputs (V) and their phonological representations (P). Here, we recorded the brain signals (ERPs and fMRI) associated with phonological recoding (i.e., V-P conversion processes) in an artificial learning situation in which participants had to learn the associations between...

The quality of handwriting is evaluated from the visual inspection of its legibility and not from the movement that generates the trace. Although handwriting is achieved in silence, adding sounds to handwriting movement might help towards its perception, provided that these sounds are meaningful. This study evaluated the ability to judge handwritin...

The mastering of handwriting is so essential in our society that it is important to try to find new methods for facilitating its learning and rehabilitation. The ability to control the graphic movements clearly impacts on the quality of the writing. This control allows both the programming of letter formation before movement execution and the onlin...

The dynamic features of sounds make them particularly appropriate for assessing the spatiotemporal characteristics of movements. Furthermore, sounds can inform about the correctness of an ongoing movement without directly interfering with the visual and proprioceptive feedback. Finally, because of their playful characteristics, sounds are potential...

RESUME A l'exception du léger frottement du stylo sur la feuille, l'écriture est une activité silencieuse. Parce que la modalité auditive est disponible pendant l'écriture et parce qu'elle est particulièrement pertinente pour percevoir des différences fines au plan temporel et dynamique, nous cherchons à comprendre comment l'ajout d'informations au...

Micrographia, an abnormal reduction in writing size, is a specific behavioral deficit associated with Parkinson's disease (PD). In recent years, the availability of graphic tablets has made it possible to study micrographia in unprecedented detail. Consequently, a growing number of studies show that PD patients also exhibit impaired handwriting kin...

A few intriguing neuropsychologial studies report dissociations where agraphic patients are severely impaired for writing letters whereas they write digits nearly normally. Here, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) together with graphic tablet recordings, we tested the hypothesis that the motor patterns for writing letters are coded...

Objective: To identify behavioral signs in graphic movement kinematics which highlight the L-dopa effect in Parkinson’s Disease (PD). Background: Thanks to the development of graphic tablets, computerized analysis of simple graphic tasks has modified the focus of interest from the product (the static trace on the paper), to the process (the moveme...

Les véhicules électriques ou hybrides circulant à faible vitesse en zones urbaines sont plus dangereux pour les vulnérables (piétons, cyclistes) que les véhicules à moteur thermique, du fait qu'ils se déplacent en silence. En réponse à ce problème sécuritaire, une réglementation pourrait, à terme, imposer un générateur de son extérieur à ce type de...

This study investigates the human ability to perceive biological movements through friction sounds produced by drawings and, furthermore, the ability to recover drawn shapes from the friction sounds generated. In a first experiment, friction sounds, real-time synthesized and modulated by the velocity profile of the drawing gesture, revealed that su...

The dynamic features of sounds make them particularly appropriate for assessing the spatiotemporal characteristics of movements. Furthermore, sounds can inform about the correctness of an ongoing movement without directly interfering with the visual and proprioceptive feedback. Finally, because of their playful characteristics, sounds are potential...

Sounds can be used to inform about the correctness of an ongoing movement, without directly interfering with the visual and proprioceptive feedback. Furthermore, the dynamic features of sounds make them particularly appropriate means of accessing the spatiotemporal characteristics of movements. Finally, because of their playful characteristics, sou...

L’outil de diagnostic de la dysgraphie, le test BHK, évalue la lisibilité de l’écriture et sa vitesse de production déterminée par le nombre de lettres écrites en cinq minutes. Diagnostiquer la dysgraphie uniquement à partir de l’analyse a posteriori de la trace écrite pose un problème. En effet, certains enfants dysgraphiques ont, au prix d’un con...

With the exception of a slight scratching of the pen, handwriting is a silent activity. Transforming it into an audible activity might sound curious. However, because audition is particularly appropriate for the perception of fine temporal and dynamical differences, using sounds to gain information about handwriting movements seems judicious. Given...

Even though we generally don't pay attention to the fric-tion sounds produced when we are writing or drawing, these sounds are recordable, and can even evoke the underlying gesture. In this pa-per, auditory perception of such sounds, and the internal representations they evoke when we listen to them, is considered from the sensorimotor learning poi...

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...

L’objectif de cette recherche est d’etudier l’ecriture chez des adultes porteurs de trisomie 21 (T21) en analysant conjointement la qualite des traces et les proprietes temporelles des mouvements afin d’extraire les mecanismes de programmation motrice et de controle du geste sous-jacents. Les productions d’adultes porteurs de T21 (n = 7) ont ete co...

In this study, we propose a method to synthesize sonic metaphors of two dimensional curves based on the mental representation of friction sound produced by the interaction between the pencil and the paper when somebody is drawing or writing. The relevance of this approach is firstly presented. Secondly, synthesized friction sounds that enable the i...

Développements / juin 2012 35 35 Développements / juin 2012 Résumé Si l'on excepte le léger crissement du stylo qui n'informe que très marginalement sur la qualité du mouvement, l'écriture est une activité silencieuse. La transformer en une activité audible peut paraître curieux au premier abord. En y réfléchissant mieux, justement parce que la mod...

Friction sounds produced by the pencil of a person who is drawing on a paper are audible and could bring information about his gestures. Here we focused on the perceptual significance of the morphology of such sounds, and to what extent human gestures could be retrieved by sounds. Inspired by a study dealing with visual perception of a moving point...

This is a longstanding knowledge that dyslexia is often linked to poor handwriting, peripheral dysgraphia or other comorbidities such as ADHD or DCD. Many studies were achieved to try to find a common neural substratum for developmental disorders and recently a cerebellar deficit and a deficit in procedural learning neural systems have been propose...

Dysgraphia is a writing dysfunction characterized by poor legibility and a slower performance time in handwriting. This disturbance during childhood results in a failure of children’s academic development. Dysgraphic children show handwriting difficulties at fast writing rates, but legibility is less degraded if they have sufficient time to write....

Fast and accurate visual recognition of single characters is crucial for efficient reading. The issue of the contribution of handwriting movements to visual perception of characters is of primary importance when one considers the striking change arising in our writing habits with the extended use of computer keyboards, and the progressive disappear...

Writing is a complex cognitive process relying on intricate perceptual-sensorimotor combinations. The switch from pen and paper to mouse, keyboard and screen entails major differences in the haptics of writing, at several distinct but intersecting levels. Handwriting is by essence a unimanual activity, whereas typewriting is bimanual. In typewritin...

The ability to recognize single letters, an important step in reading, is traditionally assumed to depend only on visual processes. However, as many of the objects surrounding us, letters are learnt through a matching between a visual configuration and movements. We review arguments suggesting that the characteristics of writing movements impact vi...

1

Nowadays, computer aided design (CAD) is widely used by designers. Would children learn to draw more easily and more efficiently if they were taught with computerised tools? To answer this question, we made an experiment designed to compare two methods for children to do the same drawing: the classical ‘pen and paper’ method and a CAD method. We as...

Previous studies on visuomotor priming have provided insufficient information to determine whether the reach-to-grasp potentiation of a non-target object produces a specific effect during response execution. In order to answer this question, subjects were instructed to reach and grasp a response device with either a power or a precision grip, depen...

Background: About half of children with Neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) have learning disabilities (Cutting & Denckla, 2003), including deficits in reading and/or motor problems. In the case of neurodevelopmental disorders (APA, 2013), reading and motor difficulties have been related to a deficit in the procedural learning system (model of Nicolson...

Many neuronal processes play a role in the overall performance of inhibition tasks, often making it difficult to associate particular behavioral results to specific processes and structures. Indeed, in classical Go/NoGo, Stop or subliminal masked-prime tasks, inhibition is usually triggered at the same time as the sensorimotor processes involved in...

Fast and accurate visual recognition of single characters is crucial for efficient reading. We explored the possible contribution of writing memory to character recognition processes. We evaluated the ability of adults to discriminate new characters from their mirror images after being taught how to produce the characters either by traditional pen-...

Questions about attention are usually addressed by cueing tasks assessing whether knowledge of stimulus-related information provided in advance will improve target processing. Here, we test the reliability of this classical paradigm by means of using neutral cues in a simple visual detection task. We compared "mixed-block" (cued/no-cued trials are...

The current study is part of a larger project aiming at offering intuitive mappings for the control of synthesis models by semantic descriptions of sounds, i.e. simple verbal labels related to various feelings, emotions, gestures or motions. Hence, this work is directly related to the general problem of semiotics of sounds. We here put a special in...

Recent data support the idea that movements play a crucial role in letter representation and suggest that handwriting knowledge contributes to visual recognition of letters. If so, using different motor activities while subjects are learning to write should affect their subsequent recognition performances. In order to test this hypothesis, we train...

A large body of data supports the view that movement plays a crucial role in letter representation and suggests that handwriting contributes to the visual recognition of letters. If so, changing the motor conditions while children are learning to write by using a method based on typing instead of handwriting should affect their subsequent letter re...

In a previous fMRI study on right-handers (Rhrs), we reported that part of the left ventral premotor cortex (BA6) was activated when alphabetical characters were passively observed and that the same region was also involved in handwriting [Longcamp, M., Anton, J. L., Roth, M., & Velay, J. L. (2003). Visual presentation of single letters activates a...