Post-doc application deadline postponed to May 26th
ILCB's monthly newsletter N°36 - May 15th, 2024
Institute of Language, Communication and the Brain 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,

With all the long weekends and spring breaks, I have hardly had the time to collect new events to announce. Lilia has already sent you a message announcing a couple of adjustments to our postdoc call. The deadline has been extended for a couple of weeks --- till May 26th. We removed the requirement that the PhD must be defended before the audition, as long as it is awarded in 2024. So, don’t miss the opportunity to attract motivated postdocs!  

Of course, there is the deadline for the registration of the summer school that is coming up soon (see post below). Please register your application only if you are certain you can make it. We are limited to 120 participants and each withdrawal takes away the possibility for someone else to attend. We have already many applicants from all over the world and there is a lot of pressure on available places.  

And, yes, there is absolutely no reason to miss learning about why you should “subdivide and conquer” when it comes to “brain processing of musical melody, harmony and rhythm”, which is the title of our next lunch talk on Friday 24th! Our invited speaker, Peter Vuust, is not only a world class scientist (see his recent paper in Nature Reviews Neuroscience), but also a top-level jazz musician. Not sure we can convince him to jam during lunch, but you can check out his latest album “Further to Fly”!

So, I look forward to seeing you soon at one of our exciting spring events.

 

Best whishes,

Johannes

Post-doc position deadline extended

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 26th, 2024

All the details...
Figure of the month
Listeners (Partly) Converge Towards an (Artificial) Partner During Phoneme Categorisation

 

Participants were asked to identify a sequence of English speech sounds as “ba” or “pa”, together with an (artificial) partner. After each response, they were informed about their partner's response, same or opposite. The responses of the artificial agent were covertly manipulated along a number of dimensions.
In this animation, each circle represents the response provided by the participant or the artificial agent to each sound, and the sigmoid curve represents the underlying categorization function, updated iteratively following each response. Participants converged towards the artificial agent in the location of the boundary between the two phonemic categories.
A Bayesian model of speech perception provides the framework to account for how listeners may infer the parameters that govern their partner’s perception.

 

Noël Nguyen, Leonardo Lancia, Lena Huttner, Jean-Luc Schwartz, and Julien Diard.
Listeners’ Convergence Towards an Artificial Agent in a Joint Phoneme Categorization Task.
Glossa Psycholinguistics 3 (1), 2004 --  @HAL



Quote of the month

 

"The curse of knowledge [emphasis added] is the single best explanation of why good people write bad prose. It simply doesn't occur to the writer that her readers don't know what she knows---that they haven't mastered the patois of her guild, can't divine the missing steps that seem too obvious to mention, have no way to visualize a scene that to her is as clear as day.*"

 

Steven Pinker
The Sense of Style.
The Thinking person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century 
Penguin Random House (2014).

 

"* In this chapter, it's the female gender's turn to be the generic writer.

Featured publications
Supported projects
ILCB summer school, 2024 edition
Applications are open...
Summary of future events

 

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

11th Implicit Learning Seminar
May 23-25, 2024 @ Salle de conférences, Campus Saint-Charles
Read more and register
ILCB lunch talk by Peter VUUST, Dept. of Clinical Medicine, Aarhus University & Royal Academy of Music
May 24th 2024 @ 12 -- Subdivide and Conquer. Brain Processing of Musical Melody, Harmony and Rhythm.
Read more and register
Conference on Multilingualism
June 10-12th 2024 @ Le Cube, Campus Schuman
Read more and register
ILCB lunch talk by Dr. Pia Rämä, Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Center - UMR 8002 CNRS & Université de Paris
June 14th 2024 @ Salle des Voûtes, 12h-14h -- Development of the Lexical-Semantic Organization in the Infant Brain: Electrophysiological Evidence
Read more and register
International Workshop on Language Production
June 26-28th 2024 @ Amphi Gastaut, Campus Pharo
Read more and register
ILCB Lunch Talk by Klaus ZUBERBÜHLER, Université de Neuchâtel
Nov 29th 2024 @ 12 -- "Revisiting the origins of meaning"
Read more and register
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