Publications by authors named "Virginie Laval"

Objectives-Our aim is to investigate the executive functions involved in idiom comprehension. The understanding of idioms has largely been explored from a developmental perspective. However, little is known about the cognitive processes involved.

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Purpose We investigated the relationships between text reading comprehension and oral idiom comprehension in adolescents. We also examined the more specific relationships between inference in text comprehension and inference in idiom comprehension. Method We selected participants from an initial sample of 140 students aged 13-15 years to form 2 groups, according to their decoding and reading comprehension abilities: 1 group of good comprehenders/good decoders ( = 49) and 1 group of less skilled comprehenders but with adequate decoding skills ( = 20).

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Idiom comprehension relies on the ability to draw inferences from different cues in a communication situation. Adopting a developmental perspective, we investigated how this ability changes across adolescence. To this end, we designed a computerized system that allowed us to simulate a communication situation through short videos placing participants at the center of the interaction.

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Hyperbole supports irony comprehension in adults by heightening the contrast between what is said and the actual situation. Because young children do not perceive the communication situation as a whole, but rather give precedence to either the utterance or the context, we predicted that hyperbole would reduce irony comprehension in six-year-olds (n = 40) by overemphasizing what was said. By contrast, ten-year-olds (n = 40) would benefit from hyperbole in the way that adults do, as they would perceive the utterance and context as a whole, highlighted by the speaker's ironic intent.

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A crossmodal effect has been observed in the processing of facial and vocal emotion in adults and infants. For the first time, we assessed whether this effect is present in childhood by administering a crossmodal task similar to those used in seminal studies featuring emotional faces (i.e.

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Previous research has suggested that children do not rely on prosody to infer a speaker's emotional state because of biases toward lexical content or situational context. We hypothesized that there are actually no such biases and that young children simply have trouble in using emotional prosody. Sixty children from 5 to 13 years of age had to judge the emotional state of a happy or sad speaker and then to verbally explain their judgment.

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Unlabelled: We examined the understanding of emotional speech by children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). We predicted that they would have difficulty understanding emotional speech, not because of an emotional prosody processing impairment but because of problems drawing appropriate inferences, especially in multiple-cue environments. Twenty-six children and adolescents with ASD and 26 typically developing controls performed a computerized task featuring emotional prosody, either embedded in a discrepant context or without any context at all.

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Purpose: This study was aimed at determining the role of prosody and situational context in children's understanding of expressive utterances. Which one of these 2 cues will help children grasp the speaker's intention? Do children exhibit a "contextual bias" whereby they ignore prosody, such as the "lexical bias" found in other studies (M. Friend & J.

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This study looks at idiom comprehension by French-speaking people with Williams' syndrome (WS) and metapragmatic knowledge is examined. Idiomatic expressions are a nonliteral form of language where there is a considerable difference between what is said (literal interpretation) and what is meant (idiomatic interpretation). WS is characterized by a relatively preserved formal language, social interest and poor conversational skills.

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The aim of this study was to examine a form of sarcasm that has hardly been considered to date, sarcastic requests, at an earlier period of development than addressed in past developmental research. This article looked specifically at the role of intonation and context in sarcastic-request understanding by native French-speaking children ages 3 to 7 years. Forty-eight children (16 per group) had to complete stories that varied on 2 factors: intonation (sarcastic and neutral) and context (sarcastic and neutral).

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