PILE, in order to FACE language troubles
PILE, International program for Child language

Presentation

This project aims a deeper knowledge of the construction and emergence of speech in child’s life. PILE works to improve both the early detection of language troubles and the cure for those children that cannot find the way toward speaking.

PILE is leading research from films showing babies interacting with their parents. Those films are shot by the video section of the Necker Children Hospital. PILE is a research project led by Professor Bernard Golse and psychologist Valérie Desjardins.

Speech and baby

Nowadays it is known that verbal language can rise only if it is preceded by a whole interactive system that makes the baby experiment communication as an act. The key idea is that the baby’s movements and looks prove the existence of a first level of an analogical communication that prepares the access to verbal language; a level that, maybe, all through his or her living, keeps “telling” the rise of communication whereas verbal language in itself has already arisen. Several prognosis indications could be noticed at that level and would allow to forecasting a possible dysphasic evolution. It is equally possible that children with autistic or psychotic risks present a certain amount of particularities regarding the bodily and preverbal behavior register of early communication.

We have established the relevance of three factors that interact and become part of the precursor process of language:

• the baby’s vocalizations;
• the baby’s hand and feet movements;
• the baby’s eyes movements and blinking of eyelids;

What characterizes this research is the focus laid on agreement, interactions and synchronization of those three factors. The goal is not, in any way, to lead a deep research of only one isolated factor.

So as to analyze the baby’s behavior, it is important to know the parental context. Such a context is defined by clinical knowledge (interview and observation, analysis of the parents’ voices).

An exemplary program

First, PILE is a strongly efficient structure thanks to collaboration between psychoanalysts organizing concepts aimed at thinking the baby’s global behavior on the one hand, and on the other hand, mathematicians that analyze the films by treating the image and sound signal. Research on the baby’s way of behaving requires rigor and precision, provided here by mathematical sciences. Those scientific analyses of the baby’s behavior are formalized by the psychoanalytic approach that offers the specific possibility to think complexity in a creative way.

Second, by its financing: PILE links together private funds (EADS, SFR, Fondation Bettencourt-Schueller) and public participations ( Necker Children Hospital, IRCAM, CERMICS at the École nationale des Ponts et Chaussée, LISIF at Paris 6 Pierre et Marie Curie), through the putting of premises and researchers’ timetables at our disposal. The video section and the technical functioning both linked to this project were entirely financed by patrons.

An international program

PILE develops its research at an international level of the francophone section of the Waimh, presided by Professor Bernard Golse.

Even nowadays, many children cannot find their way to speaking. They live in a psychic confinement, from which they could be freed faster, would the understanding of the rise of speech improve. PILE takes up the challenge.