Research

"Ninety percent of life is just being there."  -- Woody Allen [1]

 "We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honey-suckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten, a thrill of returning thought, and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. (...) Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought." [2, p15-16]

The background of my research is the embodiment of high-level cognitive functions and more especially of language. My interest for the links between body-environment and language has mixed origins, but at least three books played a major role in this interest  [2][3][4]. Even if the concept of embodiment is more popular today than it was in the 1990s, it is still not easy to quit the egocentric view of the brain and to put the brain back with the body and the world together (again?) [1, 5].
When I’m not losing myself in philosophical considerations, I’m studying motor control of communicative gestures. To move the body, the brain has to deal with the physical properties of body and environment and to adapt to changes in these properties. In other words, the motor control has to integrate the properties of the world. For this reason, I believe that the study of motor control of communicative gestures is (one of) the “royal road” to the understanding of our embodied-embedded [5] language. My research is an attempt to create links between linguistics and motor control at both experimental and theoretical levels. My topics are:

  • The role of motor control constraints in the genesis of language, with the idea that articulatory constraints may play a role in the selection of phonologic forms in the lexicons of world languages [6];
  • The hand-mouth coordination in deictic tasks [7, 8, 9]: as pointing gesture is the first link between the word and the world; as this link is the onset of symbolic communication (See above the quote from Keller) and, as hand and mouth are strongly coupled in language acquisition and in face to face interactions;
  • The sensory-motor learning of speech in adult, the way speakers modify their movements in order to compensate for a perturbation applied in real time to their auditory feedback, the way this kind of learning generalizes to other movements and situations [10, 11], and more particularly the role of context in generalization;
  • The sensory-motor component of the communicative grounding: the way people adapt their respiration [12] and gestures in communication to the respiration and gestures of another person, the role of physical characteristics of talkers in this adaptation and the relationships between these motor alignments and the linguistics alignments or convergences observed in dialogue situations.

 

[1] quote from Andy Clark’s book Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together again, MIT Press, 1998

[2] Keller, H. (1902). The story of my life. Bantam classic.

[3] Les enfants sauvages, Lucien Malson

[4] Vygotsky, L. (1934). Pensée et langage. Paris, La dispute. (published in 1997)

[5] Richardson, M. J., Marsh, K. L., & Schmidt, R. C. (2010). Challenging egocentric notions of perceiving, acting, and knowing. In L. F. Barrett, B. Mesquita, and E. Smith. (eds.). The Mind in Context. (pp. 307-333). New York, NY: Guilford.

[6] Rochet-Capella, A. & Schwartz, JL. (2007). An articulatory basis for the Labial-to-Coronal effect: /pata/ seems a more stable articulatory pattern than /tapa/, Journal of Acoustical Society of America, 121(6):3740- 3754.

[7] Rochet-Capellan, A., Laboissière, R., Galván, A. & Schwartz, JL. (2008). The speech focus position effect on jaw-finger coordination in a pointing task, Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, 51(6):1507-1521.

[8] Rochet-Capellan, A., Schwartz, JL., Laboissière, R. & Galván, A. (2006). Finger-jaw coordination during a deictic gesture with CVCV utterances: the effect of stress position, in Proceedings of the 7th International Seminar on Speech Production (ISSP’06), Ubatuba-Brazil, 193-200.

[9] Rochet-Capellan, A., Vilain, C., Dohen, M., Laboissière, R. & Schwartz, JL. (2008). Does the number of syllables affect the finger pointing movement in a pointing-naming task? in Proceedings of the 8th International Seminar on Speech Production (ISSP’08), Strasbourg-France, 257-260.

[10] Rochet-Capellan, A., Richer, L., Ostry, DJ. (in press). Non-homogeneous transfer reveals specificity in speech motor learning.

[11] Rochet-Capellan, A., Ostry, DJ. (2011). Simultaneous acquisition of multiple sensorimotor transformations in speech. Journal of Neuroscience, 31:2648-2655.

[12] Rochet-Capellan, A., Fuchs, S., Perrier, P. (submitted). How listeners’ respiration changes while listening to speech