Language

Research domain :

The linguists from the Neurofunctional Psychiatry Team are working on several projects involving typical and atypical language development, notably in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), but also in children with other developmental disorders (e.g. hearing loss, Developmental Language Disorder - DLD) and children with or without language disorder who are growing up in bilingual contexts.


Project on Bilingualism and Language Disorders


This project resulted in the creation of several LITMUS-FR tools (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings-French). Three LITMUS-FR tools were developed with the aim of constituting complementary tools for the identification of a Developmental Language Disorder in children growing up in multilingual contexts. These three tools were developed and tested by an international network of clinicians and researchers within the framework of COST Action IS0804 (http://www.bi-sli.org/). Since their creation, they have been the subject of numerous studies which have given rise to very encouraging results concerning their reliability and usefulness, both in the context of scientific research and clinical speech therapy.

The PABIQ, a parental questionnaire intended for parents of children in bilingual contexts, is one of these tools. We propose here the French version of this task, in particular for speech and language therapists wishing to use it in their clinical practice. Warning! It is a research tool and therefore its current form is likely to change; feel free to come back regularly to this webpage for updated versions.
We remind the different users (students, researchers or clinicians) that this tool is not standardized. It should only be used in addition to an overall language assessment. Using it in isolation therefore makes it impossible to determine whether or not a child is bilingual or has a language disorder. For any questions concerning the use of the PABIQ, you can send an email to the following address: bilad@univ-tours.fr

To download these files, please fill out the form by clicking here.

Here are some articles published on the LITMUS-FR tools :

de Almeida, L., Ferré, S., Morin, E., Prévost, P., dos Santos, C., Tuller, L., & Zebib, R. (2016). L’identification d’enfants bilingues avec Trouble Spécifique du Langage en France. In SHS Web of Conferences (Vol. 27, p. 10005). EDP Sciences.

de Almeida, L., Ferré, S., Morin, E., Prévost, P., dos Santos, C., Tuller, L., Zebib, R. & Barthez, M. A. (2017). Identification of bilingual children with specific language impairment in France. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 7(3), 331-358.

Ferré, S., dos Santos, C. & de Almeida, L. (2015). Potential clinical markers for SLI in bilingual children, BUCLD 39: Proceedings of the 39th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Grillo E. & Jepson K. (eds), Sommerville: MA, Cascadilla press. p. 152-164.

dos Santos, Christophe, Ferré, Sandrine. A nonword repetition task to assess bilingual children’s phonology. Language Acquisition. 2018, n°25:1, p. 58-71

Fleckstein, A., Prévost, P., Tuller, L., Sizaret, E., & Zebib, R. (2018). How to identify SLI in bilingual children: a study on sentence repetition in French. Language Acquisition, 25(1), 85-101.

Tuller, L., Abboud, L., Ferré, S., Fleckstein, A., Prévost, P., Dos Santos, C., Scheidnes, Maureen & Zebib, R. (2015). Specific language impairment and bilingualism: Assembling the pieces. In Language acquisition and development: Proceedings of GALA (pp. 533-567).

Tuller, L. (2015) Clinical use of parental questionnaires in multilingual contexts. In Armon-Lotem, S., de Jong, J. & Meir, N. (Eds.) Assessing multilingual children: disentangling bilingualism from Language Impairment. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. Pp. 299-328.

Tuller, L., Hamann, C., Chilla, S., Ferré, S., Morin, E., Prevost, P., dos Santos, C., Abed Ibrahim, L. & Zebib, R. (2018). Identifying language impairment in bilingual children in France and in Germany. International journal of language & communication disorders.
 


The project on LACA (Language Abilities in Children with Autism) is a network of 12 international labs that explores the nature and development of the language skills of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) across several languages. All language domains are examined (including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics), as well as their potential interaction with other areas of cognition (including intellectual development, working memory, executive function and theory of mind). One of LACA's objectives is to streamline the methods for collecting linguistic and non-linguistic data across the different partners and to set up a database containing experimental tests that can be used by all. This will allow for the sharing of data from different laboratories (to increase the number of participants) and for comparative studies across different languages. Another objective of the network is to set up a European research project combining several labs focusing on the communication challenges of individuals with ASD.
The LACA network met in Amsterdam (23-24 March 2017), Milan (15-16 January 2018), Reading (23-24 June 2018) and Tours (1-2 April 2019). The next meeting will take place in Patras (Greece) in October 2019. The theme of the meeting in Tours was the identification of baseline tests for language development (phonology, morphosyntax, lexicon, compositional semantics, pragmatics, prosody and reading comprehension), non-language cognitive development (executive function, theory of mind, non-verbal IQ and central coherence), and severity of autism. The goal was to come up with a battery of behavioral tests that can be used in studies of language development in ASD in various countries, which will maximize cross-study comparisons. This meeting was organized by Sandrine Ferré, Philippe Prévost, Christophe dos Santos, Laurie Tuller and Racha Zebib.

This network is funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and is led by Jeannette Schaeffer (Université d’Amsterdam) (2017-2019).  

Presentations of the team at the various LACA meetings: :
Zebib, R. (2019). ‘Executive functions’. Tours meeting , 1 April 2019.  
Tuller, L. & Ferré, S. (2019). ‘Structural language’. Tours meeting, 1 April 2019.
Bonnet-Brilhaut, F. (2018). ‘ASD diagnosis and intervention in France’. Milan meeting, 15 January 2018.  
Silleresi, Prévost, Zebib & Tuller (2018). 'On language profiles in children with autism. Reading meeting, 23 June 2018.
Prévost, P.,  Tuller, L., Ferré, S. & Zebib, R. ‘Investigating language profiles across the autism spectrum’. Amsterdam meeting, 23 March 2017.

The van Gogh Project (‘Linguistic and cognitive abilities of French- and Dutch-acquiring children with autism spectrum disorder’)

is a France-Holland Hubert Curien Partnership (PHC) between the University of Tours and the University of Amsterdam whose aim is to describe, understand and compare the grammatical, pragmatic and cognitive abilities of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder, in French and Dutch, in order to better understand communication difficulties in autism. This partnership has allowed for the development of experimental tasks in morphosyntax (on passive sentences), in phonology (in particular the adaptation in Dutch of a non-word repetition test developed in Tours) and on the interface between discourse and morphology (adaptation in French of an elicited production task of determiners developed in Amsterdam). This project was led by Philippe Prévost (University of Tours) and Jeannette Schaeffer (University of Amsterdam) (2017-2018).