Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Center / UNIVERSITÉ DE PARIS & CNRS

Profile

Thierry

Thierry Nazzi

Senior Research Scientist

I'm interested in speech perception in infants, in lexical and syntactic acquisition. Presently, i'm inivestigating the mechanisms that allow infants to acquire the different levels of properties of the native language. Our studies compare language acquisition in monolingual and bilingual infants. I'm also conducting studies on language acquisition in children with Williams syndrome, deaf children with cochlear implants, and premature infants.

Selected publications

Chen, H., Lee, D.T., Luo, Z., Lai, R.Y., Cheung, H., & Nazzi, T. 2021. Variation in phonological bias: Bias for vowels, rather than consonants or tones in lexical processing by Cantonese-learning toddlers. Cognition, 213, 104486.

Höhle, B., Bijeljac-Babic, R., & Nazzi, T. 2020. Variability and stability in early language acquisition: comparing monolingual and bilingual infants’ speech perception and word recognition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 23, 56-71.

Nazzi, T., & Cutler, A. 2019. How consonants and vowels shape spoken-language recognition. Annual Review of Linguistics, 5, 25-47.

van Ommen, S., Boll-Avetisyan, ..., & Nazzi, T. 2020. Language-specific prosodic acquisition: a comparison of phrase boundary perception by French- and German-learning infants. Journal of Memory and Language, 104108.

Von Holzen, K. & Nazzi, T. 2020. Emergence of the C-bias during the first year of life: New evidence from own name recognition. Infancy, 25, 319-346.

Projects

Language acquisition in atypical development

While our work focuses on understanding the mechanisms underlying typical language acquisition, knowledge of these mechanisms then allows us to explore whether such mechanisms are present or not in various populations having atypical language acquisition, and might be implicated in their learning difficulties (with potential impact for designing remediation techniques).

Proccesing phonological information while learning and recognizing words

Consonants have been proposed to have more weight than vowels at the level of lexical processing. We found that the C-bias is present in French from 8 months to adulthood, in many lexically-related processes.

Predicting language outcomes in typical development

We explore how elementary perceptual and learning mechanisms, implicated in language development, may be measured at the individual level (using combined behavioral and imaging methods) to derive early biomarkers predictive of subsequent language delay.

Role of visual information in speech perception/production development

We explored how visual information aids the early acquisition of linguistic sound patterns.

Prosodic grouping biases from birth to adulthood in monolingual speakers

The Iambic-trochaic Law (ITL) is an auditory grouping mechanism according to which sequences of sounds varying in intensity/pitch are grouped as trochees, while those varying in duration are grouped as iambs.