Language acquisition in atypical development

While our work focuses on understanding the mechanisms underlying typical language acquisition, knowledge of these mechanisms then allows us to explore whether such mechanisms are present or not in various populations having atypical language acquisition, and might be implicated in their learning difficulties (with potential impact for designing remediation techniques). One of our studies, focusing on the first two years of life, is exploring phonological, lexical and semantic acquisition in very preterm infants, to evaluate the hypothesis that prematurity might affect differentially different language sub-domains. A second study is comparing prosodic perception in infants and adults with either autism spectrum or Williams syndrome, as previous findings suggest that this domain might be severely impaired in autism spectrum but relatively spared in Williams syndrome.