Céline Hidalgo
I have been working as a speech therapist for 10 years.
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Along my clinical practice, I have been specifically interested in hearing loss (i.e. children wearing hearing aids and/or cochlear implants and educated in an auditory environment).
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More precisely, I seek to understand to what extent this sensory deficit can alter high-level auditory perception and cognitive processing, such as those required during language development.
I am currently undergoing a post-doc at the Institut de Neurosciences des Systèmes and I also worked as a speech therapist at the ENT of la Timone. This position allows me to:
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develop new ecological paradigms for assessing linguistic abilities of children with hearing loss
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analyze temporal processing and predictive skills of children with hearing loss during verbal interactions
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- measure to what extent an active music rhythmic training can improve temporal predictive skills implied in speech processing during conversation
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My work is inspired by the dynamic attending theory, temporal predictive coding and active sensing (i.e. role of the motor system in auditory perception). We seek to capitalize on the neuronal entrainment phenomenon to improve predictive skills of children with deafness and enhance their communicative skills and social participation.
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As music practice improves temporal predictions and auditory perceptive capacities, we use an active musical rhythmic training to optimize the neuronal entrainment capacities on children with hearing loss.
MY LATEST RESEARCH
This new paradigm is a naming task in which children name pictures in alternation with a virtual partner. We manipulated temporal features of the virtual partner in order to render speech interaction more or less predictable. Analyses of children adaptations to these temporal variations reveal some of their temporal anticipatory skills in speech. We delivered this task to children with hearing impairment following 30 minutes of speech therapy and after 30 minutes of an active rhythmic training and we measured children's temporal performances in both conditions of stimulation. Results show that children's speech turns are more regular with respect to the virtual partner after the rhythmic training; rhythmic training make them more sensitive to the temporal structure of the speech alternation. This high-order temporal perception of speech allow them to predict more precisely the virtual partner speech and to better adapt to it.