ILCBs monthly newsletter N°12

ILCB's monthly newsletter

N°12 - March 15th, 2022

Bringing together experts in linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, medicine and computer science to understand and to model how language functions.

Dear members of the ILCB,

I just realized that this is Newsletter #12, which means an entire year has gone by already! What better way to mark this anniversary than receiving the midterm evaluation of the international jury:

“The committee highly recommends continued funding of ILCB… wants to mention the excellence of the work accomplished…. its prominent international position attracting strong candidates on all levels… the high quality of the research units and individuals involved…its interdisciplinary component…its support for junior researchers…its capacity to function in an integrative manner…credibility and scope of the training…educational programs that are successful in attracting good students… the CREx engineering support for projects being one of the strong achievements…and the output of numerous high-quality publications being impressive”.

To top it all, we are invited to submit our application to become one of the interdisciplinary institutes of AMU (Institut d'établissement) mid-April for an audition early May. All of this wouldn't be possible without your continuous ongoing support. ILCB is more than a group of individual scientists, it’s a big family of people who care, share, build and have fun. The two HDR defenses last Friday (Kristof Strijkers and Adrien Meguerditchian) and the Mind Fare Workshop this Friday are cases in point!

For those of you who still want to provide some indicators for our annual 2021 report (distinctions, events, illustrations, co-funding), we still have a couple of days before closing our inquiry. Please follow this link, and thanks in advance!

Best wishes,

Johannes

Quote of the month

“If we are to achieve any substantive understanding of language performance it is necessary that we examine the micro-structure of the entire process as it occurs in real time.”

David Swinney

The process of language comprehension; an approach to examining issues in cognition and language.

Cognition, 1981, 10 (1-3), 307-312 SMASH

Figure of the month

Hippocampal and auditory contributions to speech segmentation

We used frequency-tagging analysis to quantify the neuronal synchronization between the hippocampus and auditory regions, on the one hand, and the temporal structure of words and syllables of an artificial speech stream, on the other hand (A). Intracranial recordings in the hippocampus and auditory cortex (B) show that auditory regions are highly responsive to syllable frequency whereas the hippocampus responds mostly to word frequency (C). These findings provide direct evidence of the involvement of the hippocampus in the speech segmentation process.

Ramos-Escobar, N., Mercier, M., Trébuchon-Fonséca, A., Rodriguez-Fornells, A., François, C., & Schön, D. (2022). Cortex.

Scientific portrait

ILCB visiting Prof. Martin Pickering

Professor Martin Pickering is Director of Research for the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences at the University of Edinburgh (UK). Prof. Pickering works in the areas of psychology of language and communication, including…

Annual ILCB workshop organized by docs & postdocs

18/03/2022

18/03/2022. Mind Fair: A Walk Through Language, Communication and the Brain

Featuring keynotes by Jessica Dubois (Inserm, NeuroDiderot, NeuroSpin, Paris), Guy Vingerhoets (Ghent Univ), William Hopkins (Texas Univ), Benjamin Morillon (INS, Marseille) & Kristof Strijkers (LPL, Aix-en-Pce), as well as hands on experiences analyzing neurophysiological data, programming interactive experimental protocols, discovering R and Python, promoting open science, and much more...

Details & Registration

Neurostimulation & Neuronavigation Workshop

April 4-5, 2022

All interested people of the Aix-Marseille community are invited to participate in a workshop on Human non-invasive neurostimulation and neuronavigation. Local and international speakers will discuss the methods of non-invasive brain stimulation, their applications in motor, perceptual and language domains and their limits. Beware: places are limited to 50! Morning talks will take place at the Espace Pouillon (bât 6), Saint Charles Campus, and afternoon practical sessions in TMS setups on Saint Charles and Timone campuses. Students are warmly encouraged to participate. This workshop is co-financed by ILCB.

Detailed program & Registration