ILCB's monthly newsletter N°35

ILCB's monthly newsletter

N°35 - April 15th, 2024

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,

I hope you enjoyed the KALEIDOSCOPE workshop organized by our PhD and Postdocs. You’ll find a couple of photos below, but don’t miss the short video made by the Development Research Group accessible in the Highlights of our cross-cutting topics. Warm thanks to all the participants and organizers! As the title of the workshop announced, I spent an amazing “Journey through Multidisciplinary Insights”.

It has also been a great pleasure to attend this month the 2023 thesis award ceremony (“Prix de thèse AMU”), which featured two former ILCB docs: Camille Grasso whose PhD was supervised by Marie Montant, Jenny Coull, and myself (ED 356: Language, Education and Cognition) and Yannick Becker who was supervised by Adrien Meguerditchian and Olivier Coulon (ED 62: Life Sciences).

[Adrien Meguerditchian, Jean-Patrice Albrand, Camille Grasso, Yannick Becker, and Jo' Ziegler]

Talking of ILCB succcess stories in the making, we have two open post-doc positions, each two year long, to be filled in 2024. The deadline for applications is set to May 15th, 2024. Please share the details with your scientific networks.

Next Friday, the ILCB lunch talk will be given by Jennifer Culbertson from the University of Edinburgh who will talk about “Beyond typology: experimental explorations of language universals”. Don’t forget to register.

Best whishes,

Johannes

Two ILCB post-doc positions open

The ILCB offers up to two postdoc position in 2024 on any topic that falls within the area of language, communication, and the brain.

The deadline is

May 15th, 2024

All the details...

Figure of the month

Individual effects of sleep deprivation may be observed in vocal biomarkers

Spectral modulations ("timbre" - left panel) and temporal modulations ("linguistic rhythms" - right panel) characteristics of a sleepy voice. These markers of sleepiness have been derived through the explainability of AI, specifically Support Vector Machines, which were trained to recognize vocal samples from sleep-deprived individuals. This study underscores the importance of elucidating AI through interpretable acoustic features, shedding light on the operations of these powerful yet opaque systems.

Etienne Thoret, Thomas Andrillon, Caroline Gauriau, Damien Léger, and Daniel Pressnitzer.
Sleep Deprivation Detected by Voice Analysis
2024. PLOS Computational Biology 20 (2): e1011849 -- @HAL

Quote of the month

"A nonadjacent dependency is a relationship between two temporally or spatially separated elements, which cannot be explained simply by the occurrence of multiple pairs of adjacent relationships. For example, [...] in tense agreement: “Is [talk]ing,” “Has [talk]ed”. [...] When sufficient cues are provided, nonadjacent dependency learning has been demonstrated in human adults and infants, and some nonhuman animals, suggesting that in both evolutionary and ontogenetic terms this ability appears to arise before the origins of language."

Wilson, Benjamin, Michelle Spierings, Andrea Ravignani, Jutta L. Mueller, Toben H. Mintz, Frank Wijnen, Anne van der Kant, Kenny Smith, and Arnaud Rey.
Non-Adjacent Dependency Learning in Humans and Other Animals.
Topics in Cognitive Science 12 (3): 843–58.

Make it more explicit at the 11th Implicit Learning Seminar, May 23-25th, Marseille

Portraits of the month

ILCB docs, postdocs, and other members share and discover a variety of experimental tasks during the recent ILCB’S KALEIDOSCOPE event, "A Collective Journey through Multidisciplinary Insights".
(Photos JZ)