Calendrier

The 400 languages and 25 language families of Australia are famed for their highly uniform phonologies. How this degree of uniformity is even possible is one of the great unsolved mysteries of human cultural diversification. In this talk I introduce the key properties of Australian phonologies and concentrate on three particularly interesting matters: [1] the unusual way in which place of articulation operates in the phonologies of the continent, [2] recurrent processes of sound change which, ironically, act to keep phonemic inventories in a stable state, and [3] a recent proposal by Butcher (2019), that the cause of all of this is ultimately epidemiological: Australian phonologies have adapted to a population that suffers widespread hearing loss due to inner ear infections in infancy.

• Aude Noiray (Université Potsdam, Allemagne)

Spoken communication is a biological behavior emerging very early in development and effortlessly in most children. It is shaped by multi-faceted developments in the speech motor, perception, lexical and phonological domains, which develop in a seemingly parallel fashion. While most of those competences have been well studied in the last decades, developmental interactions between domains have typically been conducted in separate strands. Yet, findings suggest they interact dynamically over time. In this presentation, I will first discuss research conducted with colleagues addressing the development of coarticulation in young children and show that while the maturation of the speech motor system is certainly crucial to spoken language fluency, the concurrent development of other skills must be considered to explain children’s individual trajectories. I will then present recent research illuminating non-monotonic interactions between the motor, lexical and phonological domains from the preschool age to the beginning of primary school. Last, I will introduce preliminary results suggesting an early interaction between infants’ attention to linguistically relevant orofacial information and their vocal repertoire. Altogether, the findings motivate an integrated approach of spoken language development in which various skills are envisioned as interacting dynamically over time and are fundamental to the growth of each of them.