Dear members of the ILCB community,

Over the past years, language development has become an increasingly important cross-cutting topic at the ILCB. After the creation of a very active project team on Computational Communication & Development (CoCoDev) in May 2020 and the acquisition of a fNIRS system for the new baby lab at St. Charles, I am pleased to announce that we just decided to create a new project team focused on the creation of an ILCB longitudinal language development corpus.

This project group will build on the work of Clément François and Laurent Prévot’s 80 PRIME grant (Ph.D. of Estelle Hervé presented at the annual retreat), Shreejata Gupta’s postdoc project (see portraits below) and Clément François’ ANR grant (PhD of Giulia Danielou) to create a unique corpus on early language development from birth to primary school. The corpus will feature recordings of infants’ linguistic environment, measures of neurodevelopment, electrophysiological recordings of auditory processing, eye movements in word learning tasks, gestural markers of emotion comprehension, and much more. Now that the ILCB is a permanent institute, we have a unique opportunity to follow children over a long period of time, and to create a dataset that could become a highly visible international reference to advance our understanding of normal and abnormal language development.

I was also very pleased by the great attendance at our first ILCB lunch talk of the year. The seminar featured a talk by Jean-Remi King (CNRS & Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research, Meta) on Language in the brain and algorithms, followed by a lively afternoon session where Jean-Rémi King interacted with members of the ILCB PhD program presenting their research projects.

So, save the date for our next lunch talk by Olga KEPINSKA on November 18!

Best wishes

Johannes

" [...] un groupe de recherche qui marche, c'est un engrenage socialement institué de problèmes et de manières de les résoudre, un réseau de contrôles croisés, et, du même coup, tout un ensemble de productions qui, en dehors de toute imposition de normes, de toute orthodoxie théorique ou politique, ont un air de famille."

Pierre Bourdieu

in Questions de Sociologie (1984; Editions de Minuit; p. 52)

"[...] a research group that works is a socially established gear of problems and ways of solving them, a network of crossed controls, and, by the same token, a whole set of productions that, outside of any imposed norms, any theoretical or political orthodoxy, have an air de famille."

October 19th to 21st, Campus Saint-Charles

As you may know, ILCB has recently acquired a NIRS/EEG machine (Nirscout system, 16 optodes and 32 electrodes) which will be one of the spearheads of the future BabyLab in St Charles, “Le Labo des Minots”.

Very few laboratories in France, or in the world, are equipped with such a material. The strengths of the two techniques are combined, generating strong spatial but also temporal resolution.

Moreover, this type of equipment is perfectly adapted to the study of babies and young children. This is a great opportunity for the ILCB community and for Aix-Marseille University in general.

To better master the theoretical and methodological aspects of this cutting-edge technology, we propose a 2.5-day training course on the St. Charles campus, October 19th, 20th, and 21st, 2022.

We need to know how many people want to attend this training. Please contact Nadéra Bureau for further details and registration.

Clément François, Isabelle Dautriche, Nadéra Bureau

Please always check the events page on the ILCB website for the latest update.