Research activities
The dominant epistemological position of the Department is empirical, insofar as the objects of study are rooted in observable language behaviors. It takes shape both in observational approaches (where the phenomena under study are collected in the context of ecological communicative exchanges) and in experimental actions (in the context of situations constructed with a view to eliciting the appearance of the targeted phenomena, in a hypothetical-deductive thought process).
The observations are collected by means of an instrumentation ensuring, at least, the storage of the observed phenomena (capture, digitalization, labeling) and, if necessary, their objectified analysis (spectral, spectrographic techniques, duration and intensity contours, etc.).
The focus on oral language and the use of acoustic instrumentation make it easy to exploit the data collected from a phonetic-phonological point of view. However, the MSL Service’s focus on the oral side of language should not be confused with the development of an exclusive focus on the phonic aspects of productions. The team’s interest extends to all the specificities of oral language, whatever their nature (phonic, of course, but also pertaining to higher levels of language production mechanisms); its questions orient it towards the fundamental aspects of cognitive research, more specifically in its psycholinguistic dimensions. The scientific dynamics underlying this research are more concerned with understanding the processing of language by the human brain-mind than with the simple description of the phenomena produced by the users of linguistic systems.
Most of the Department’s research questions, within the specific framework of speech sciences, the classical variance-invariance dichotomy (variability, variation, variants, etc.). It covers the various types of variability that characterize the oral productions of subjects in communication situations, whether these variabilities are individual or social, voluntary or involuntary, conscious or unconscious, normal or pathological, … and whether they lead to transient or lasting changes. Research questions may thus concern the description and measurement of the extent of variability, the explanatory factors of variability, the structural mechanisms of variability, the elements of systems likely to be more or less resistant to variability, etc.
These questions can be addressed at each of the levels through which language can be understood in its aspects of oral production (prosody, vowel and consonantal timbre, duration, reduction phenomena, etc.).
Our unit is also associated with the following UMONS research institutes :
