Please register below if you wish to attend this colloquium.
Time: Tuesday 16/12/2025, 13:00-15:00
Location: S.M.107
Abstract
In individuals with language disorders, studies consistently report increased disfluencies – both in children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and in adults with aphasia (Befi-Lopes et al., 2014; Saharoui & Martínez-Ferreiro, 2021). However, if there are studies on typically developing children (Bellifemine, 2024) and adults (Özkan et al., 2023), little is known about how these populations manage communicative breakdowns multimodally to repair their speech. We examine the way adults with non-fluent aphasia and children with expressive DLD, compared to healthy controls, organize self-repair sequences through gestures and pauses. Participants included 22 French-speaking children with expressive DLD (aged 7-10) and 22 age- and gender-matched controls, filmed during a narrative task; and seven adults with non-fluent aphasia (aged 34–80) with age-matched controls, filmed during spontaneous conversation. Self-repairs (lexical, syntactic, phonological), gestures (referential, pragmatic), and pauses (filled, silent) were annotated. Each self-repair was analyzed in relation to its gestural and temporal construction. Results show that typically developing children produced more non-referential beat gestures during selfrepairs, whereas children with DLD relied primarily on referential gestures. Adults produced both gesture types equally. No difference in pauses was observed between the two groups of children, whereas adults with aphasia produced longer pauses than healthy controls. Four multimodal patterns emerged, defined by the coordination of pauses and gesture types. These patterns were shared by children with and without DLD but differentiated adults with and without aphasia. Thus, while disfluencies such as pauses and self-repairs are not pathological markers in children, they may serve as such in adults.
References
Befi-Lopes, D. M., Cáceres-Assenço, A. M., Marques, S. F., & Vieira, M. (2014). School-age children with specific language impairment produce more speech disfluencies than their peers. CoDAS, 26(6), 439–443.
Bellifemine, C. (2024). Non-referential beat gestures and their function of self-repair in children's narratives. Journal of Child Language Acquisition and Development-JCLAD, 12(1), 963-987.
Özkan, E. E., Healey, P. G. T., Gurion, T., Hough, J., & Jamone, L. (2023). Speakers Raise Their Hands and Head During Self-Repairs in Dyadic Conversations. IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, 15(4), 1993-2003.
Sahraoui, H. & Martínez-Ferreiro, S. (2021). Disfluency patterns in the connected discourse of individuals with agrammatic aphasia, Virtual Meeting: 9th Novi Sad Workshop on Psycholinguistic, Neurolinguistic and Clinical Linguistic Research, 30th October 2021.
Bio
Doctor of Language Sciences (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris), I have been an Associate Professor at Université de Lorraine (Metz) since 2024, within the UR 3476 CREM Research Lab. My PhD thesis focused on the relationship between syntactic complexity in discourse, gesture use in children with and without Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), and the influence of activity type.Over the years, my research interests have broadened. They now center on interaction analysis, syntax, reference management, and disfluencies in both typical and atypical language, in children and adults—always approached from a multimodal perspective.I have worked with children with neurodevelopmental disorders during my Master’s and PhD studies, and contributed to data collection from adults with aphasia for the AADI project (Aphasie, Analyse du Discours en Interaction). I am a member of the RaProChe project (Recherche-Action Professionnel·les-Chercheur·es), which aims to observe childcare professionals’ child-directed speech to facilitate language acquisition. I am also a member of the DinLang project (Dîners familiaux, Langage et multimodalité), which studies multimodal, multi-party interactions between adults and children during family meals.I have supervised Master’s theses on multimodal and verbal behaviors in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and adults with Aphasia, Schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). I currently co-supervise two PhD theses on discourse coherence in schizophrenia and non-verbal training in AD.
