ILCB's monthly newsletter N°47

ILCB's monthly newsletter

N°47 - May 15th, 2025

Institute of Language, Communication and the Brain
Bringing together experts in linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, medicine and computer science to understand and to model how language functions.

Dear members of the ILCB community,

A warm thank-you to all who joined us for the ILCB scientific retreat on Porquerolles Island. This year, we were fortunate to welcome nearly all members of our International Advisory Board, who traveled from across the globe. Some delivered keynotes, others led round tables, and all engaged in rich discussions, sometimes late into the night!

Just imagine: the lecture room was only 50 meters from one of the most stunning beaches in France, and yet no one skipped a session. That tells you how exciting and inspiring the talks truly were.

I would like to remind you that the deadline for the ILCB postdoctoral fellowship applications is approaching: deadline May 20th. Potential candidates should contact their prospective host lab and collaborators within the ILCB before submitting.

Finally, don’t miss our next Lunch Talk on May 23, where Steve Majerus from the University of Liege will speak about "The foundations of verbal working memory in the language system. Please remember to register in advance, so we can plan lunch accordingly.

I looking forward to seeing you soon.

Best wishes,

Johannes

Postdoc position open

2 year postdoc position — Deadline May 20th, 2025

The Institute for Language Communication and the Brain (ILCB) offers one postdoc position in 2025 on any topic that falls within the area of language, communication and the brain. The ILCB assembles several top research laboratories in linguistics, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, medicine/neurology, computer science, and mathematics that are located in Aix-en-Provence, Avignon and Marseille.

Portrait of the month

Elisa Gavard

Elisa Gavard recently completed her PhD in cognitive psychology at Aix-Marseille Université, having conducted her research at the Centre de Recherche en Psychologie et Neurosciences (CRPN, CNRS/AMU). Elisa studied the role of semantic and syntactic prediction, and statistical learning in typical and atypical reading. She explored how predictive mechanisms support reading aloud, particularly in university students with developmental dyslexia who have learned to compensate for their difficulties. During the preparation of this PhD,…

Figure of the month

Self-supervised models pre-trained on speech extract meaningful information from non-human primate vocalizations.

We explored knowledge transfer capabilities of pre-trained speech models with vocalizations from the closest living relatives of humans: non-human primates. We assessed model performance in identifying individual gibbons based on their songs using linear probing. When compared to models pre-trained on bird songs or general audio, speech-based models appear to produce rich bioacoustic representations, encoding vocal content information over background noise and effectively capturing the temporal dynamics of gibbon songs.

Jules Cauzinille, Benoît Favre, Ricard Marxer, Dena Clink, Abdul Hamid Ahmad, and Arnaud Rey.
Investigating Self-Supervised Speech Models’ Ability to Classify Animal Vocalizations: The Case of Gibbon’s Vocal Signatures
In Interspeech 2024, 132–36. ISCA. — @HAL

Quote of the month

"the ‘core’ language network […] is strongly interconnected, independent of input and output modalities, causally important for language and language-selective.
[…] this language network plausibly stores language knowledge and supports core linguistic computations related to accessing words and constructions from memory and combining them to interpret (decode) or generate (encode) linguistic messages. "

Evelina Fedorenko, Anna A. Ivanova, and Tamar I. Regev. 2024.
The Language Network as a Natural Kind
within the Broader Landscape of the Human Brain.
Nature Reviews Neuroscience 25 (5): 289–312