Lunch Talks

Jennifer Culbertson Human languages exhibit striking variation. At the same time, certain linguistic patterns crop up again and again, while others seem to be extremely rare. What these tantalising observations tell us about human language is one of the most contentious questions in linguistics. Do similarities between languages reflect a special capacity for language that […]

Peter Vuust : Director of the Center for Music in the Brain (MIB), MSc, PhD, Prof. in Neuroscience, Dept. of Clinical Medicine, Aarhus University, Prof. in Music, the Royal Academy of Music,  Aarhus/Aalborg, Denmark, Bassist and composer   Music is ubiquitous across human cultures—as a source of affective and pleasurable experience, moving us both physically […]

Dr. Pia Rämä Until recently, there has been little evidence regarding how and when infants begin to integrate words into an inter-connected lexical-semantic system. Recent event-related potential (ERP) studies show that lexical-semantic system emerges together with early vocabulary during the second year of life (Rämä et al., 2013; Rämä et al., 2018). These studies also […]

Klaus Zuberbuhler   The three core properties of language – meaning, syntax and social interaction - have received considerable comparative research attention in recent years, driven by a desire to advance theories of language evolution. Somewhat surprisingly, progress on the origins of meaning has been least remarkable, after the initial pioneering discoveries of referential signals […]

Steve Majerus Professeur à l’Université de Liège https://www.uliege.be/cms/c_9054334/fr/repertoire?uid=u182078   Many models of verbal working memory acknowledge interactions with verbal long-term memory. The nature of these interactions remains, however, a matter of debate. I will present a series of behavioral and neuroimaging studies showing that (1) even subtle aspects of language knowledge such as syntactic positional […]

Professor : Olivier Collignon Evolution has endowed humans with several senses allowing them to capture distinct forms of energies from their physical environment, opening different windows through which we can experience the world around us. Being able to capture redundant sensory information allows us to build stronger representations and react faster to an event (eg  […]

Steve Majerus Professeur à l’Université de Liège https://www.uliege.be/cms/c_9054334/fr/repertoire?uid=u182078   Many models of verbal working memory acknowledge interactions with verbal long-term memory. The nature of these interactions remains, however, a matter of debate. I will present a series of behavioral and neuroimaging studies showing that (1) even subtle aspects of language knowledge such as syntactic positional […]

Fumiko Hoeft Recent advancements in our understanding of dyslexia have highlighted the complex interplay between neurobiological mechanisms and comorbid conditions such as depression and stress. The Neural Noise Hypothesis (NNH) of dyslexia proposes that dysregulated neural activity, characterized by excessive glutamatergic neurotransmission, leads to the disrupted auditory and visual processing that typifies this learning disorder. […]