Conference | Social Practices and Deafness
Pragmatic skills in children with cochlear implants: observing their development in a natural setting
Wednesday, May 27, 2026, from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m., in room C-316 at IRDPQ St-Louis and online.
This presentation will be followed by a seminar (in person only).
Presented by Laurence Vincent-Durroux, with the collaboration of Karine Martel, Lana Bennett and Paul Colin.
*Univ. Grenoble Alpes, LIDILEM, F-38000 Grenoble, France / ** INSEI, Research Group on Disability, Accessibility, Educational and School Practices, Suresnes, France
How do young deaf children develop their communication skills on a daily basis? This conference explores the pragmatic skills of profoundly deaf children with cochlear implants, observed between 30 and 55 months of age in natural play situations with a familiar adult.
Based on a video corpus collected at regular intervals from twelve French-speaking and English-speaking children, the analysis focuses on how children initiate, maintain, and share conversation topics, as well as on the dynamics of turn-taking with adults. The study focuses in particular on two key periods of development (37–39 months and 46–48 months) in order to better understand the evolution of interactions and the child’s engagement in the exchange.
By highlighting the links between pragmatic skills and morphosyntactic development, this research provides valuable insight into language development in deaf children, based on authentic communication situations, thus complementing the knowledge often derived from standardized tests.
About Laurence Vincent-Durroux
Laurence Vincent-Durroux est Professeure des Universités en Linguistique anglaise à l’Université Grenoble Alpes depuis 2014, après avoir débuté sa carrière à Montpellier et fait un Ph.D. en études françaises à l’Université de Sherbrooke. Elle est agrégée d’anglais.
She is a member of the LIDILEM Laboratory (Linguistics and Didactics of Foreign and Native Languages), where she is responsible for the DEL research project: Deafness, Cochlear Implantation, and Language.