A corpus-based study of agrammatic aphasia: New evidence for the potential prominent part played by adaptive strategies in these patients' oral production

International audienceThis study investigates the plausibility of "adaptation theory" in oral agrammatic production by means of large and systematic corpora studies. The hypothesis of agrammatism being, at least partly, an adaptive behaviour is thus tested, following some assumptions put forward by Nespoulous (2000) and Hofstede and Kolk (1994). Variability in the use of strategies, combined with the improvement or decrease of fluency and / or grammatical accuracy, lead us to suggest that some "performance rules" are very likely to reflect linguistic output adjustments we observed, which may be due to the agrammatic speakers' adaptive abilities. The intervention of monitoring (focused attention on form) might be responsible for the inconsistent use of strategies

Working memory performance in expert and novice interpreters

International audienceSimultaneous interpreting is generally assumed to be particularly demanding with respect to cognitive resources like attention and working memory, which are thought to gradually increase with professional practice. Experimental data to corroborate such an assumption is still sparse, however. Here we report an in-depth investigation of working memory capacity among 21 professional interpreters (experts), 18 second-year interpreting students (novices) and two control groups (20 multilinguals and 20 students). Tests involved either short-term retention alone; short term retention and processing in a recall task with articulatory suppression, a listening span task, and a category and rhyme probe task; or attention alone in a unilingual and bilingual Stroop test. No between-group differences in simple span tasks and the Stroop test were found. Significant group effects were observed in free recall with articulatory suppression, in the category probe task and in the listening span task. The best performance was always produced by the novice interpreters rather than by the experts. These findings are discussed in relation to a) the novice-expert distinction and the role of working memory in the development of interpreting skills, and b) the nature of the task and possible strategies involved

Microstructure Formation in Freezing Nanosuspension Droplets

The structural evolution of suspensions upon freezing is studied with optical microscopy in a suspended droplet configuration. Droplets have millimeter size and consist in an aqueous mixture of silica particles while the surroundings phase is hexane. Freeze-thaw cycles are applied to this system and a two-step freezing mechanism evidenced. A fast adiabatic growth of dendrites that invade the full droplets is first observed, and occurs within a few milliseconds. Then a slow process lasts for several seconds and corresponds to the release of solidification latent heat into the hexane phase. The striking feature of this work is to evidence that after the first freeze-thaw cycle flocculated microstructures are generated. When a second cycle is performed, microstructures further flocculate and generate, for dense silica suspensions, stable porous spheres of the size of the droplets. A phenomenological description based on repulsion or engulfment of particles by solidifying ice fronts is proposed

Interphonologie et représentations orthographiques. Le cas des catégories /b/ et /v/ chez des apprenants japonais de Français Langue Etrangère.

L'article essaie de clarifier l'apprentissage de catégories phonologiques dans une langue seconde quand cette dernière ne fait pas partie des catégories de la langue source. Il soulève aussi la question de l'orthographe et la façon dont elle peut interagir dans l'apprentissage pour des langues à longue tradition orthographique comme le japonais ou le français

Pierre-François Souyri, Nouvelle Histoire du Japon

Peu nombreux sont les livres présentant, en français, une histoire générale du Japon. Il convient donc de saluer toute nouvelle tentative éditoriale synthétique en la matière. La Nouvelle Histoire du Japon de Pierre-François Souyri est la plus récente publication de ce type, portant à trois les ouvrages de ce genre, réalisés par des historiens français, chacun étant, dans son format, fort différent des deux autres. Il y a tout d’abord : 1) le « Que sais-je ? » de Michel Vié, Histoire du Japon..

Les débats du temps post-colonial, des années 1950 à nos jours

Comme annoncé dans l’éditorial du numéro 18 de Cipango, ce numéro 19 constitue le deuxième volume de notre projet éditorial « Le Japon et le fait colonial ». Il sera cette fois-ci question du temps postcolonial, au sens le plus littéral, et donc chronologique de ce terme. Le lecteur voudra bien se reporter à l’éditorial du précédent numéro afin de prendre connaissance du cadre général, historique et historiographique partagé par ces deux numéros. La date du 15 août 1945 constitue un feuilleté..

Spatial semantics: the processing of Internal Localization Nouns

International audienceThis paper considers the processing of an important class of spatial lexemes –called Internal Localization Nouns (ILNs)– which are used for designating the different parts of entities. It is grounded on a detailed linguistic analysis of the studied lexemes in terms of geometrical, functional and contextual/pragmatic properties. The experiment described in this work mainly focuses on ILNs calling for orientation notions. It consists in a pointing task which makes systematically vary the geometrical and functional properties of entities as well as the position in which they are displayed. The impact of these changes in the interpretation is evaluated through the measurement of response latencies. This protocol provides interesting data on the part played by several complex parameters –such as gravity, geometrical and functional saliency, motion, canonical use, etc. – in the processing of orientational ILNs