Over the years, we have broadened our research themes to include both segmental and suprasegmental acquisition, both L1 and foreign languages, and new methods integrating multimodality and music.
We hope to develop all of these aspects in order to have a global and application-oriented vision of phonetic and phonological acquisition in first and foreign languages. In order to achieve this, we combine experimental studies with analyses of corpora collected in situ, in conjunction with Methods: Corpora, analysis tools, experimental and computational approaches.
We also hope to expand the populations we study: as well as the monolingual children and adult learners that we already investigate, we will add bilingual children (both simultaneous and heritage-language bilinguals), children learning a foreign language, and adult bilinguals. The learning contexts will be varied in order to obtain the most detailed description of acquisition in an ecologically-valid context: a rich corpus recorded at a child’s home, natural interactions between natives and non-natives, and schoolchildren in classroom situations.
The theme’s social and pedagogical aspects will also be reinforced, for example by studying the possibly negative effect of wearing a mask on the acquisition of vocalic contrasts, but also by analyzing practices and factors that may aid the acquisition of language sound systems, such as the role of gesture, the use of speech synthesis and computer-based game applications, as well as the role of interaction (responding, shadowing, imitating).