Aude
NOIRAY

PROJECT

Exploring the link between infants’ visual attention and their speech motor productions

Speech is a biological behavior emerging very early in development. It is shaped by multi-faceted interactions in the speech motor, perceptual, lexical and phonological domains, which develop in a seemingly parallel fashion. The primary goal of this project is to investigate the developing relationship between infants’ visual attention and their vocal repertoire in the early stages of spoken language development.
During the first year of life, infants’ perceptual abilities, initially limited to sound discrimination evolve towards a complex perception system, specific to the native language. From a speech production standpoint, between 6 and 12 months of age, infants transition from vegetative vocalizations to babbling, which represents infants’ first syllables. This essential step paves the way towards the complex spoken language system of adults.

The goal of this project is to first investigate an early link between visual attention and speech production in infants between 6 and 12 months of age. To this end, the project uses eye-movement tracking, ultrasound imaging of the tongue and vocal productions.
The findings drawn from this research will be used to submit a large joint research proposal with the DDL lab to elucidate the causal relationship between the development of speech perception and its production and detect possible disruptions in infants with a family history of language disorders that could later impact social and school integration.

BIOGRAPHY

Aude Noiray is a researcher at the Department of Linguistics, Cognitive Sciences at the University of Potsdam (Germany), an affiliate researcher at Haskins Laboratories (USA) and Laboratoire de Phonétique (UQAM, Montreal).

Following her PhD in Language Sciences at Grenoble-Alpes university in France, she has worked for 13 years in the academic community, first as a postdoctoral fellow at Haskins Laboratories (USA) then as a researcher and lecturer at Potsdam University (Germany), last as the director of the Laboratory for Oral Language Acquisition (LOLA) at the university which she created early 2015.
Aude Noiray’s research investigates the interactions between speech motor control and other language-related abilities (e.g., perception, phonology, reading). One of her main goal is to dissect the developing relationships between these processes to provide a unifying account of language development in typically developing children and to use this knowledge to understand the challenges children with speech and/or language related impairment encounter.
To achieve these goals, her research employs various methods including acoustic recordings, kinematic measurement of speech articulators, attention/perceptual tests as well as behavioral assessments of language-related abilities.

In Lyon, she collaborates with the DDL laboratory and with the DENDY team that focuses on (a)typical language development.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Popescu, A., & Noiray, A. (2021). Reading proficiency interacts with speech articulation: better readers show greater speech motor differentiation. Journal of Language, Learning and Development.
• Kolozsvári, O., Xu. W, Parviainen, T. , Nieminen, L., Noiray, A., Hämäläinen, J. (2021). Age-related differences in coherence between brain activation and speech envelope at word and sentence levels. Neurobiology of language.
• Noiray, A., Ries, J., Tiede, M., Rubertus, E., Laporte, C., & Ménard, L. (2020). Recording and analyzing kinematic data in young children and adults with SOLLAR: Sonographic & Optical Linguo-Labial Articulation Recording system. Laboratory Phonology.
• Rubertus, E., & Noiray, A. (2020). Vocalic activation width decreases across childhood: evidence from carryover coarticulation. Laboratory Phonology, 11(7).
• Offrede, T. F., Jacobi, J., Rebernik, T., Jong L., Keulen, S., Veenstra, P., Noiray. A., & Wieling, M. (2020). The Impact of Alcohol on L1 vs. L2. Language & Speech.
• Noiray, A., Popescu, A., Killmer, H., Rubertus, E., Krüger, S., & Hintermeier, L. (2019). Spoken language development and the challenge of skill integration. Frontiers in Psychology, Language Sciences.
• Noiray, A., Wieling, M., Abakarova, D., Rubertus, E., & Tiede, M. (2019). Back from the future: Nonlinear anticipation in adults' and children's speech. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 62(8S), 3033-3054.
• Noiray, A., Abakarova, D., Rubertus, E., Krüger, S., & Tiede, M. (2018). How do children organize their speech in the first years of life? Insight from ultrasound imaging. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 61(6), 1355-1368.
• Rubertus, E., & Noiray, A. (2018). On the development of gestural organization: A cross-sectional study of vowel-to-vowel anticipatory coarticulation. PLOS One, 13(9).
• Abakarova, D., Iskarous, K., & Noiray, A. (2018). Quantifying lingual coarticulation in German using Mutual Information: an ultrasound study. Journal of Acoustical Society of America, 144(2), 897-907.
• Noiray, A., Abakarova, D., Rubertus, E., & Mooshammer, C. (2016). Lexical and phonological effects on word planning in English children. Satellite “Word planning and production”, Labphon 15, Ithaca.
• Noiray, A., Rubertus, E., & Mooshammer, C. (2016). Phonological competition in young learners of English. Satellite “Word planning and production”, Labphon 15, Ithaca.
• Noiray, A., Ménard, L., & Iskarous, K. (2013). The development of motor synergies in children: Ultrasound and acoustic measurements. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 133(1), 444-452.
• Whalen, D. H., Shaw, P. A., Noiray, A., & Antony, R. (2011). Analogs of Tahltan consonant harmony in English CVC syllables. In W.-S. Lee & E. Zee (Eds.), Proceedings of the 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Hong Kong, 2129-2232.
• Noiray, A., Cathiard M.A., Abry C. & Ménard L. (2010). Lip Rounding Anticipatory Control: Crosslinguistically Lawful and Ontogenetically Attuned. In B. Maassen & P. van Lieshout (eds.), Speech Motor Control: New developments in basic and applied research, Oxford University Press. 153-171.