ILCBs monthly newsletter N°21

ILCB's monthly newsletter

N°21 - January- 15th, 2023

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,

I was just starting to write my usual introductory paragraph when I came across the announcement of "Minds at play", a 2-day ILCB workshop entirely organized by the students of our Master of Cognitive Science (MASCO) with guidance from Marie-Hélène Grosbras.

I felt happy (and proud!) that our students were able to organize such an amazing event with highly distinguished colleagues covering topics across ethology, anthropology, psychology as well as computational and cognitive neurosciences, touching upon applied issues pertaining to education and remediation.

In a nutshell, this is what ILCB is all about. Connecting disciplines and people to tackle important questions from an interdisciplinary perspective. There are no limits when great minds are at play. Well done!

Talking about students, I wanted to remind all of us that our PhD and postdoc grants are sustained by an ILCB environment. The students participate in a PhD program. They can be financed to attend international conferences or do “in-doc” research internships with colleagues from the international ILCB network (Auriane Boudin provides a recent example.) Similarly, ILCB can finance our docs and postdocs' research expenses, such as access to brain imaging platforms and other research facilities (Jules Cauzinille provides a recent example.) Do not hesitate to use our monthly recurrent project scheme (“projets au fil de l’eau”) to submit your requests. Please, keep in mind that all requests need to be submitted 1 week before the monthly directory meetings. Forms and monthly deadlines are available online.

Also, remember that we just published our 2023 postdoc call.

Finally, I wanted to remind you that we are always happy to welcome international visitors who want to do a research visit at the ILCB. There is, of course, the prestigious IMERA ILCB chair for research visits of 5 or 10 months, but we can also finance much shorter visits provided that there is an interest for the ILCB and/or a close collaboration with members of the ILCB.

Best wishes

Johannes

Figure of the month

Multilevel Linguistic Features Constrain Speech Comprehension

Humans are experts at processing speech, but how this feat is accomplished remains a major open question. We investigated how speech comprehension is determined by seven different linguistic features, ranging from acoustic modulation rate to contextual lexical information. All these features independently impact the comprehension of accelerated speech, with a clear dominance of the syllabic rate—the orange data-point on the figure. We also derived the channel capacity—i.e., the maximum rate at which information can be transmitted—associated with each linguistic feature. From these observations, we articulate an account of speech comprehension that unifies dynamical, informational and NLP frameworks.

Jérémy Giroud, Jacques Pesnot Lerousseau, François Pellegrino, and Benjamin Morillon. 2023.

The Channel Capacity of Multilevel Linguistic Features Constrains Speech Comprehension.

Cognition 232 (March): 105345. -- @HAL

Scientific portraits

Jonathan Grainger

After beginning his career as a CNRS researcher in Experimental Psychology in Paris in 1988, Jonathan Grainger founded and directed the Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive (LPC – CNRS & Aix-Marseille University) from 2000 to 2012. During this period, the LPC joined two other CNRS labs to create the Pôle 3C…

Entretiens ILCB / Fed3C

Science podcast featuring Jonathan Grainger

Mireille Besson and Vicent Hok (LNC) present the third ILCB / Fed3C science podcast, where they interview senior members of the ILCB or the Fédération 3C. The conversations are organized around three topics: (i) the speaker's scientific career, (ii) the evolution of theories in their field(s), and (iii) the evolution of the job itself. This last episode features Jonathan Grainger.

To the podcasts...

ILCB 2023 postdoc call

Deadline February 28 th, 2023

Up to three post-doc positions are open this year by the ILCB.

More information

Postdoc position at AMPIRIC

Orthography and writing

A position is open to recruit a French-speaking postdoctoral fellow to drive a project on how children learn to write (handwriting, keyboarding) within the new team "Orthography and writing" hosted by the AMPIRIC Institute. The local environment is highly dynamic in the fields of cognitive development, language, and education. The team has access to brain imaging platforms (fMRI, MEEG, fNIRS) and to AMPIRIC's new experimental platform for education sciences

More information

Cognitive Science Workshop

The students of the master of cognitive sciences invite you to a workshop on GAMES.

The event will bring together experts in primatology, neuroscience, educational science, psychology, and anthropology. It will be an opportunity for participants and speakers

to confront their perspectives on games,
to learn more about the neural processes underlying motivation, decision making, perception of chance, or and addiction,
to discuss the uses of games and gamification in different contexts, and, finally,
to discover local companies that develop games for different purposes.