When Jack isn't Jacques: Simultaneous opposite language-specific speech perceptual learning in French-English bilinguals.

Humans are remarkably good at understanding spoken language, despite the huge variability of the signal as a function of the talker, the situation, and the environment. This success relies on having access to stable representations based on years of speech input, coupled with the ability to adapt to short-term deviations from these norms, e.g.

Transfer of sensorimotor learning reveals phoneme representations in preliterate children.

Reading acquisition is strongly intertwined with phoneme awareness that relies on implicit phoneme representations. We asked whether phoneme representations emerge before literacy. We recruited two groups of children, 4 to 5-year-old preschoolers (N = 29) and 7 to 8-year-old schoolchildren (N = 24), whose phonological awareness was evaluated, and one adult control group (N = 17).

Transfer of Learning: What Does It Tell Us About Speech Production Units?

Purpose: Words, syllables, and phonemes have each been regarded as basic encoding units of speech production in various psycholinguistic models. The present article investigates the role of each unit in the interface with speech articulation, using a paradigm from motor control research.

Method: Seventy-six native speakers of French were trained to change their production of /be/ in response to an auditory feedback perturbation (auditory-motor learning).

[A specific questionnaire to evaluate therapeutic inertia in hypertensive patients: a pilot study].

Background: Therapeutic inertia (TI) is a recent concept still unknown by many physicians. In chronic diseases such as hypertension, it is defined as the tendency of physicians not to increase or change antihypertensive medications when the target blood pressure is not reached. Acting on TI could improve blood pressure control in France.