Recherche

Psycholinguistics

The research group "Psycholinguistics" is made up of four teams:

Professors Uli Frauenfelder and Pascal Zesiger also are in charge of the Program of Logopaedics of the University of Geneva.

Research fields

Language Processing

  • Our investigation of strategies and units of speech segmentation involve the use of several methods including real-time experimentation, computer modelling, brain imaging, artificial language learning and the analysis of language databases. The research aims at evaluating the contribution of different sources of information (phonetic, phonotactic, lexical and prosodic) and their conjoint action in lexical segmentation.
  • Our cross-linguistic studies investigate the difference in the processing and representation of grammatical gender in the lexicon as a function of language specific properties (French, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Croatian, and English).
  • Other research examines the psychological pertinence of certain syntactic properties identified by formal syntax for explaining diverse phenomena such as interference in agreement and different syntactic disorders.
  • Reading by adults is being investigated in collaboration with several French researchers (Liliane Sprenger-Charolles and Christel Leuwers). Furthermore, a diagnostic tool for evaluating reading skills is being elaborated, and compensatory strategies via morphological processing in adult dyslexics are being studied.

Research on language development and disorders

Different research axes on normal and language disordered children are pursued:

  • Several research projects on early language acquisition are in progress in our "baby" lab, one of which concerns the specification of phonological representations in the infant and toddler (12, 18 and 24 months) and another concerns word comprehension in the infant (about 16 months).
  • Several studies on the role of phonology and phonological working memory in language acquisition have been conducted with children (4-5 years old) to examine the relation between lexical skills and the phonological, metaphonological working memory abilities.
  • The acquisition of grammatical categories in the spontaneous productions of SLI children has been initiated within the context of the Programme plurifacultaire "Langage et communication: Acquisition, traitement et pathologie des structures lexicales et grammaticales". It aims to identify the markers that characterize the language of SLI children with respect to that of normal children.
  • The acquisition of lexical and grammatical orthography (in collaboration with the Université Catholique de Louvain) has been studied in various experiments with children ending their primary school (5th grade). The aim of these studies is to better understand the factors that contribute to the acquisition of both lexical and grammatical orthography.
  • Research on the sentence comprehension and production has begun in order to examine the nature (abstract or lexicalized) of the syntactic representation of word order in young children between the ages of 20 and 36 months. Other research examines the acquisition of more complex structures involving subordination (subject and object relatives) in older children (5 to 9 years).