Additional info on my research

At the end of my PhD, I had the opportunity to spend 6 months (full time) in an institution for adolescents suffering from deficits ranging from language to broader cognitive deficits but also disorders of psychiatric nature. 

For these children who display particular difficulties in learning (words, time, actions, rules...), I tried, together with the caring team, to take advantage of advances in Embodied cognition/Co-speech gestures literature to generate a « tool » that would hopefully help them in their learning in daily life.

Given the difficulty to take all parameters into account, I finished adapting a game and asked these children to learn action verbs (that would be of interest ; cooking/woofing verbs) with or without iconic gestures (adapted from French Sign Language). During the game, I asked them to mimic my gestures while producing the verbs.

Of course, the large variety in their deficits have been a major problem in emphasizing a clear benefit of associating gesture to word learning (some showed advantage, other did not). However, we particularly noticed that for a children who suffered from Down syndrome, it was strikingly successful ! Knowing what help which children might be a first step towards adapted refined procedures.

I believe that such experience is relatively rare in our careers but I am happy I did it as it reminded me the final outputs of my research. Thus, I am particularly grateful to the caring team and the children for their welcome.

This experience and how it was handled in concert with the professionals of the institute led to a publication in French:

Ravella, P., Fargier, R., Magdinier, P., Dubost, V., Jallade, M.F. and Sibille, M. (2014). Le geste et la parole. Histoire d'une recherche thérapeutique sur l'apprentissage associé de mots et de gestes, L'information psychiatrique, Volume 90, p. 485-492 [pdf] O

Outside the lab 

Among other things, I like to play music, wildlife photography, contemporary art/design, (french) bread, good pastries and tea. 

All at the same time is even better!