The guest of the B-AIR Soundings series this time is dr. Clément François, a researcher at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), based at the Words, Speech and Language (Parole et Langage) Laboratory of the Aix Marseille University, and the Institute for Speech, Communication and the Brain. He obtained his PhD in neuroscience from the University of Aix Marseille, where he carried out research under the supervision of dr. Daniel Schön from 2007 to 2011. The topic of his PhD was the implicit statistical learning of linguistic and musical structures in musicians and non-musicians. He studied the subject in both adults and children using neurophysiological measurements and behavioural methods in a variety of experimental cross-sectional and longitudinal designs. This research, published in leading scientific journals in the field, is among the reference works in the neuroscience of music. The research was part of a larger French National Research Agency project on music-induced brain plasticity and the transfer of training from music to language. Between 2013 and 2019, Clément François was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Barcelona in dr. Rodriguez-Fornells' Mind Functions and Brain Plasticity Research Group and in dr. Bosch's Attention, Perception and Language Development Laboratory. He was interested in the longitudinal study of speech segmentation based on statistical learning in preterm and term infants. In parallel, he coordinated a multimodal neuroimaging study in children who had suffered a stroke. Head physician Igor M. Ravnik, M.D., spoke to the eminent French scientist on our broadcast.
