Information-oriented and cross-language aspects on speech and cortical rhythms by François Pellegrino
2018-12-08 12:00 - 15:00 (Europe/Paris) | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Information-oriented and cross-language aspects on speech and cortical rhythms by François Pellegrino (CNRS & Université de Lyon, Dynamics of Language Lab UMR5596)
During the last two decades a growing body of evidence has shown a close relationship between temporal structure of speech and neural oscillatory activities, especially in the theta and gamma bands. More specifically, several recent models suggest that the neural capacity to track speech dynamics and rhythmic patterns is crucial for speech processing and understanding. However, it is well known that speech periodicity is limited and thus that the story is probably more complex than acknowledged previously.
In this talk I present results of a cross-language comparison of 17 languages in terms of syllabic speech rate, Shannonian information rate and of their shared tendency to very unevenly distribute information among their segments and syllables. These results are discussed in the light of cortical rhythms in the theta band and I introduce a (very) speculative hypothesis stating that there may be a functional distinction between syllables whose role is to convey information and syllables whose role is to provide a rhythmic carrier entraining neural oscillations.

ILCB Lunch-talk by Nuria Sebastian, Ghislaine Dehaene
2019-01-25 10:00 - 14:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
10h00 Are human infants able to use symbols?, Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz
11h00 Coffee
11h20 The onset of bilingualism: Specificities in the first year of life, Nuria Sebastián Galles
12h20 Discussion
13h00 Lunch

Are human infants able to use symbols?
Human adults commonly use symbolic systems (e.g. speech, numbers, writing code, algebraic formula) to represent aspects of the external world, and they easily and flexibly go from symbols to objects and vice-versa. This “symbolic mind” might be related to a distinct human neural architecture, in particular, the expansion of the associative areas and the development of new long-distance fiber tracts, such as the arcuate fasciculus. More efficient connections to and from the frontal lobe and a longer memory buffer may lead to the discovery of more abstract structures, and ultimately enable to represent the external world with a symbolic system.
This neural architecture is in place at full-term birth and brain imaging studies have revealed that higher-level associative regions, such as frontal areas, are involved in infant’s cognition from start. We may thus expect that infants might share the same symbolic competence than adults and that they can easily learn labels to represent classes of objects. To support this claim, I will present brain imaging data showing the infants’ structural and functional brain architecture and ERP data obtained through a new paradigm as a first step to test symbolic representations in the infant brain.
Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz, INSERM U992, Neurospin, Saclay (France)
The onset of bilingualism: Specificities in the first year of life
How different is the process of language learning in infants exposed to two languages from birth? It was not so long ago when the available evidence pointed to a delay in language learning in bilinguals. At present, a bulk of studies indicates the existence of specific adaptations to the process of language learning. In the present talk I will focus on the emergence of such adaptations during the first months of life.
Nuria Sebastian, University Pompeu Fabra-Center for Brain and Cognition Department (Barcelone)

Competitive neurocognitive networks underlying learning and memory: from stress to brain stimulation by Dezso Nemeth
2019-03-01 12:00 - 14:30 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
by Prof Dr Dezso Nemeth
Affiliation:

Centre de Recherche en Neurosciences de Lyon, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1
IMÉRA, Aix-Marseille Université
Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest

Human learning depends on multiple cognitive systems related to dissociable brain structures. These systems interact not only in cooperative but sometimes competitive ways in optimizing performance. Previous studies showed that manipulations reducing the engagement of frontal lobe-mediated explicit, attentional processes can lead to improved performance in striatum-related procedural learning. Here I present four studies in which we investigated the competitive relationship between implicit statistical learning and frontal lobe-mediated executive functions. Our result shed light not only on the competitive nature of brain systems in cognitive processes, such as language, learning, and memory but also could have important implications for developing new methods to improve human learning.

Understanding publication practices, (models and time-courses) across disciplines to improve the impact of your inter-disciplinary research
2019-03-28 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
An inter-disciplinary discussion at ILCB
In our modern science practices, it would not be surprising to hear that the three most important assets for a scientist are… publication, publication, publication!
But what exactly is a publication? The answer to this question could be very different across disciplines, and many of its significant aspects are evolving.
Across disciplines, the increment of knowledge is conceived and packaged in diverse formats (working papers, proceedings, monographies, articles, etc.) which are attributed vastly diverse value.
Across disciplines, the relationship between the author, the reviewers and the publishers can be vastly different. The business models of scientific publication have experienced major innovations in recent times, and presumably more changes lie ahead.
Across disciplines, the course of conception, dissemination, and archiving of a scientific contribution are practiced quite differently. The public discussion of findings can precede or follow publication. In some disciplines, the predictions preceding an empirical study can now be archived in advance as pre-registrations, which can be referred to later to clarify whether the authors observed exactly what they predicted or predicted exactly what they observed, thus strengthening the impact of the contributions.
The inter-disciplinary “Institut Convergences ILCB” (Institute for Language, Communication, and the Brain) organizes a scientific discussion about current publication practices across disciplines. The issues above and related topics will be discussed by 4 specialist speakers.
This scientific discussion will have two goals. First, to create common knowledge, across practitioners of different disciplines, of what their collaborators in other domains consider a scientific contribution. Second, to reflect upon and hopefully improve the publication strategies of researchers.
Schedule
11h00 – 11h10: Motivations for this seminar by F.-Xavier Alario, P. Blache, E. Runnqvist (ILCB)
11h10 – 11h50: Peer review across disciplines: from mutual ignorance to standards setting? by Didier Torny (Mines ParisTech – Paris)
11h50 – 12h30: Registered Reports: A vaccine against bias in science and publishing by Chris Chambers (Cardiff University, Editor of the journal Cortex)
12h30 – 13h30: Lunch on site
13h30 – 13h40: An insight into the publishing models in the Humanities and Social Sciences by Sandra Guigonis (OpenEdition, Centre pour l’édition electronique ouverte)
13h40 – 14h20: Researchers regain control of their means of publication by Marie Farge (Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris)
14h20 – 14h50: Round table (30 debate)
14h50 – end: Coffee, discussions, etc.
Abstracts in the next page
Didier Torny, Peer review across disciplines: from mutual ignorance to standards setting?
Peer review is often claimed as the only way to provide certified knowledge to scientific communities and various audiences. However, this very recent label includes a multitude of different, even contradictory, practices, devices, values. Interdisciplinary research, and the existence large publishing groups around the world have first created unexpected meetings between once unique forms of evaluation and publication, then some actors have tried to unify practices through different channels (guidelines, technical infrastructure, shared rules). The presentation will illustrate some contemporary examples of this rich history, including questions of the anonymity of authors and reviewers and the introduction of post-publication peer review in journals.

Chris Chambers, Registered Reports: A vaccine against bias in science and publishing
In 2013, Cortex became the first journal to offer Registered Reports, a format of preregistered empirical publication in which peer review happens prior to data collection and analysis (see https://cos.io/rr/). The aim of Registered Reports is to overcome publication bias and various forms of researcher bias (e.g. selective reporting of statistically significant results and hindsight bias), by performing peer review in part before studies commence. Publishability is then decided by the importance of the research question and quality of the methodology, and never based on the results of hypothesis testing. In this talk I will introduce the concept of Registered Reports and provide an update on its progress at at Cortex and beyond, including its uptake by more than 150 journals, including outlets in the Nature group, generalist journals including Royal Society Open Science, and emerging clinical trial formats. I will also discuss early evidence of impacts on the field and emerging Registered Report funding models in which journals and funders simultaneously assess proposed protocols. Together with a wide range of allied initiatives, Registered Reports are helping to reshape the life and social sciences to place theory, transparency and reproducibility at the forefront.

Sandra Guigonis, An insight into the publishing models in the Humanities and Social Sciences
OpenEdition is a comprehensive digital publishing infrastructure at the service of scientific information in the Humanities and Social Sciences. It provides the academic communities with four publishing and information platforms: OpenEdition Journals (504 journals), OpenEdition Books (6,775 books), Hypotheses (2,870 Research blogs) and Calenda (41,094 announcements of international academic events). The portal is thus a space dedicated to the promotion and dissemination of research, publishing tens of thousands of scientific documents that promote open access, while respecting the economic equilibrium of publications. It benefits therefore from a comprehensive overview on the publishing models in the HSS, be it traditional practices or emerging trends.

Marie Farge, Researchers regain control of their means of publication
The scientific edition is currently owned by an oligopoly of a few publishers, who consider it an exceptionally juicy market. Thus, scientists have lost control of their publishing tools and have become “cash cows”, forced to produce ever more and faster…. I will explain how the “Gold Open Access” model, designed by these publishers to preserve their market, undermines scientific creativity and the public finances that support research. I will show how the “Green Open Access” model and the “Diamond Open Access” model, designed by researchers to disseminate their publications, avoid these perverse effects. I will present as examples the platforms https:// dissem.in and https://www.centre-mersenne.org/.

In search for the cognitive foundations of Euclidean geometry ............................................................................................................................................ Towards processing theories of conversation
2019-04-26 11:00 - 14:00 | Malmousque, Chemin de la Batterie des Lions, Marseille, 13007, France
11h Dr. Véronique Izard (Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Center, CNRS & Université Paris Descartes) : In search for the cognitive foundations of Euclidean geometry
12h Prof. Antje S. Meyer (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen The Netherlands) : Towards processing theories of conversation

13h Lunch
Confirm attendance (mandatory) by sending an email to lunchtalks@ilcb.fr

In search for the cognitive foundations of Euclidean geometry
Euclidean geometry has been historically regarded as the most “natural” geometry. Taking inspiration from the flourishing field of numerical cognition, in the past years I have been looking for the cognitive foundations of geometry: Do children, infants, and people without formal education in geometry have access to intuitive concepts that bear some of the content of Euclidean concepts? Results have been mixed. In particular, we found that angle, a central tenant of Euclidean geometry, is not intuitive for children. These results call into question the status of Euclidean geometry as a natural geometry.

Towards processing theories of conversation
Most experimental research into spoken language has focused either on speaking or on listening. However, these processes should also be studied together, not only because they naturally co-occur in conversation and likely affect each other, but also because an integrated research approach can lead to novel insights into the architecture of the cognitive system supporting language use. I will provide an overview of a research program on speaking and listening in dyadic contexts. The starting point is the model of turn-taking in conversation proposed by Levinson and Torreira (2015). Though based exclusively on observational data the model makes strong processing predictions. A key claim is that speakers begin to plan their utterances as early as possible during their interlocutor’s turn, in order to be prepared to respond quickly. Experimental evidence showed that speakers indeed begin to plan their utterances before the end of the preceding turn but, contrary to the prediction, not necessarily as early as possible. Rather than following a fixed rule (“plan as early as possible”) they appear to be quite flexible in their utterance planning. Current work aims at uncovering the factors that limit this flexibility. It appears that, in addition to social and pragmatic factors that define the speaker’s processing goals, capacity limitations arising in different components of the cognitive system play an important role. I will end by discussing how speakers might achieve smooth turn-taking without intensive linguistic dual-tasking.

Brains in Harmony: the role of brain-to-brain synchrony in naturalistic social interactions
2019-07-02 12:00 - 14:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Brains in Harmony: the role of brain-to-brain synchrony in naturalistic social interactions
Neuroscience research has produced tremendous insight into how the human brain supports dynamic social interactions. Still, laboratory-generated findings do not always straightforwardly generalize to real-world environments. To fill this gap, I collaborate with scientists, artists, and educators to take neuroscience out of the laboratory, into schools, museums, and underserved neighborhoods. We consistently find a relationship between brain-to-brain synchrony and successful social interaction. For example, empathy, joint action, and social motivation predicts synchrony in dyadic interactions, and synchrony among high schoolers is related to classroom social dynamics and student engagement. Taken together, our multidisciplinary approach may provide a potential new avenue to investigate social interactions outside of the laboratory.

Suzanne Dikker (New York University Department of Psychology USA)

Prospects for Collaborative Research between Latin Palaeography, Cognitive Psychology and the Neurosciences
2019-10-11 12:00 - 14:00 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Prospects for Collaborative Research between Latin Palaeography, Cognitive Psychology and the Neurosciences
Twenty years ago, Brian Stock, the distinguished Canadian historian of medieval literature and philosophy, published Augustine the Reader, a seminal resource for examining the patristic vocabulary for reading in the fifth century C.E. The Latin verbs videre and inspicere came to be closely associated with, and in some instances synonyms for the act of reading. A survey of surviving manuscripts of the fifth and sixth century reveals remarkable dissimilarities between them and the papyri of the classical age of Cicero and Quintilian. Codices, not scrolls, they incorporated patterns of space, signs (notae), ink color (red and eventually blue, green and yellow) and numerical annotations that facilitated the disambiguation of text and the extraction of meaning. Changes in the patterns of inserted intra-textual space, beginning with the cola et commata format perfected by Jerome for the Vulgate Bible, are especially worthy of note. These spatial innovations led to the aerated text format, normal in the ninth century, that I have described in Space Between Words. Speaking as a humanist who admires the “hard sciences”, it appears to me that innovations in the neurosciences over the past two decades, notably the ready availability of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), offers the possibility of developing experiments for scientifically analyzing in precise terms the impact of the evolving graphic innovations that from the fifth to the twefth centuries came to support the modern practice of silent reading. My question today is: Is it now possible to formulate laboratory experiments capable of casting light on the psychological and neurological implications of the evolution of the Latin page that transpired between Antiquity and the central Middle Ages? And if so, what are the implications for analyzing the text format of Western European vernacular languages such as Irish and Old English?

Paul Saenger
Curator of Rare Books emeritus, The Newberry Library, Chicago

Musicians at the cocktail party: Neural correlates of bottom-up and top down mechanisms
2019-11-15 12:00 - 14:00 | Amphi MASSIANI, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13331, France
“Musicians at the cocktail party: Neural correlates of bottom-up and top down mechanisms”
Robert Zatorre
Montreal Neurological Institute
McGill University
Segregating sound mixtures makes demands on multiple cognitive and neural mechanisms that musical training may enhance or exploit. In a series of studies we have documented the music-related enhancement behaviorally in the context of speech in noise, and also in a selective attention context with competing speech streams. Using functional MRI, we observed that musicians’ enhanced speech-in-noise perception was associated with better decoding of speech in auditory areas at high signal-to-noise ratios (SNR), whereas under low SNR conditions the enhancement was associated with decoding in frontal and motor cortical regions. We interpret this finding as indicating a shift from bottom-up to top-down mechanisms depending on the quality of the input, with musicians being better able to deploy either mechanism as a function of the conditions. We then used MEG to look at the neural representation of competing speech streams via decoding of the neural signature (amplitude envelope) of attended vs unattended items. The behavioral advantage associated with musical training was related to enhanced ability to represent both streams in auditory cortex, consistent with their capacity to follow multiple sound streams in music. These cognitive neuroscience approaches help us to develop better models to explain why musicians are good at cocktail parties (apart from their reputed drinking abilities).

Using Data Science to Study Children's Cognitive Development
2019-11-22 11:00 - 12:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
“Using Data Science to Study Children’s Cognitive Development” Abdellah Fourtassi
Following the seminal work of Piaget, the traditional approach in cognitive development has focused on studying the structure of children’s knowledge in controlled situations (e.g., laboratory experiments). While this approach allows for precise inference about how children behave in certain tasks, it cannot provide an understanding of the social context within which knowledge emerges. In fact, it has been known, at least since Vygotsky, that children acquire new skills and concepts with the help of more competent members of society who scaffold the children’s learning, allowing them to attain skills that are just beyond their current abilities. In fact, much of the children’s abstract knowledge about the world, it has been argued, is mediated through discussions with their parents/caregivers.
In this talk, I explain how new advances in Data Science, especially in Natural Language Processing (NLP), allow us to 1) account for what and how information is presented to children by their parents through language, and 2) make precise predictions about the way this information can be used by children in controlled designs. Thus, NLP can create a fruitful synergy between controlled and naturalistic research methods. More generally, I argue that a complete theory of cognitive development requires interdisciplinary research across computer science and psychology.

What we learn and when we learn it: the interaction of maturation and experience in music and language
2019-11-29 12:00 - 14:00 | FRUMAM, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
What we learn and when we learn it: the interaction of maturation and experience in music and language
Virginia Penhune
Department of Psychology, Concordia University
Laboratory for Motor Control and Neural Plasticity
https://www.concordia.ca/artsci/psychology/research/penhune-lab.html
The impact of training or experience is not the same at all points in development. Children who learn to play a musical instrument or speak a second language early in life are often more proficient as adults. In the domain of music, a wealth of anecdotal evidence suggests that early training is important for musical skill, however, there has been little evidence directly demonstrating the impact of the age of start. To address this question, work in my laboratory has compared behavior and brain structure in early- (<7) and late-trained ( >7) adult and child musicians, showing differences in behavior and brain structure. More recently, we have compared early- and late-trained musicians with simultaneous and sequential bilinguals, showing differential effects of age-of-start in the arcuate fasciculus. I will discuss these findings in the context of our understanding of the interaction between normative development and specific experience, and describe a model of gene-environment interactions that integrates the contribution of age of start.

Cerebral Processing of Voice Information: From Monkeys to Deep Learning
2020-01-24 12:00 - 14:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Pascal Belin, Institut de Neurosciences de La Timone, CNRS & Aix-Marseille Université, France
—————————
How do we extract and process the treasure-trove of information in voices? Experiments involving techniques ranging from monkey neuroimaging to deep learning provide an increasingly detailed picture of the ‘vocal brain’ and its evolution in primates. Results suggest an organization in several ‘voice patches’ analogous to that of the face patch system.

Prof. Friedemann Pulvermüller (Freie Universität Berlin)
2020-02-07 12:00 - 14:00 | FRUMAM, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Brain-language models, prediction and the neural basis of communication

Louis-Jean Boë GIPSA-lab, UGA–CNRS, Grenoble
2020-03-27 11:00 - 14:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
The Dawn of Speech is Older Than We Thought

The production of speech repurposes an entire set of anatomical features that are primarily used for vital functions: breathing, sucking, chewing and swallowing. Hypotheses about the dawn of speech try to determine the period during which our ancestors began to produce, by exaptation, differentiated vocalizations associated with different social relationships. Anatomical and acoustic analyses of baboon vocalizations tend to show that the sounds themselves and the articulatory gestures that produce them are comparable to those of human vowels. If we interpret these vocalizations as audio fossils, the beginnings of speech would date back more than 20 million years, to the period when our ape ancestors separated from old world monkeys. The recent work that underlies this hypothesis invalidates a long controversy that motivated several multidisciplinary teams. By breaking the anatomical lock that claimed to restrict production of non-human primates’ vocalizations, they have opened the doors to many avenues of research that had previously seemed blocked.
L.J. Boë, T.R. Sawallis, J. Fagot, P. Badin, G. Barbier, G. Captier, L. Ménard, J.-L. Heim, J.L. Schwartz (2019) Which way to the dawn of speech?: Reanalyzing half a century of debates and data in light of speech science. Science Advances, 5, 12, eaaw3916 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aaw3916
F. Berthommier, L.J., Boë, A. Meguerditchian, T.R. Sawallis, G. Captier (2018) Comparative Anatomy of the baboon and human vocal tracts: Renewal of methods, data, and hypotheses. In Origins of Human Language: Continuities and Discontinuities with Nonhuman Primates. Ed. by L.J. Boë, J. Fagot, P. Perrier, J.L. Schwartz. Berne: Peter Lang.
DOI :https://doi.org/10.3726/b12405
L.J. Boë, F. Berthommier, T. Legou, G. Captier, C. Kemp, T. R. Sawallis, Y. Becker, A. Rey, J. Fagot (2017) Evidence of a vocalic proto‑system in the baboon Papio papio suggests pre-hominin speech precursors. PLOS ONE 12, e0169321 doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0169321

Modèles bayésiens de la cognition et du langage par Julien Diard et Jean-Luc Schwartz
2020-07-02 11:00 - 12:00, 2020-07-09 11:00 - 14:00
Dans la série « Les cours (dé-)confinés de l’ILCB », nous avons le plaisir de vous annoncer deux prochains cours en ligne sur les approches bayésiennes dans le domaine des intégrations sensori-motrices, de la cognition, et du langage.
Cours 1 : Introduction à la modélisation bayésienne en sciences cognitives
Résumé : Les probabilités forment un outil très largement utilisé en sciences cognitives, de l’hypothèse du « cerveau bayésien » aux modèles « bayes-optimaux » du traitement de l’information sensorielle, en passant par les méthodes statistiques modernes. Dans cette première séance, nous vous présenterons un aperçu de ces approches bayésiennes en sciences cognitives, à travers différents exemples de modèles bayésiens du raisonnement, de la perception, et de la perception multi-sensorielle.
Date : jeudi 2 juillet, 11h-12h.
Lien d’accès : https://amuskype.univ-amu.fr/deirdre.bolger/QMMD5P3D
Cours 2 : COSMO, un cadre computationnel pour la modélisation bayésienne de la communication parlée
Résumé : Comment la modélisation bayésienne des processus cognitifs peut-elle nous permettre de répondre à des questions théoriques dans le domaine de la communication parlée ? Cette présentation aura la forme d’un TP en ligne, de mise en application des principes vus dans le cours 1. Elle sera basée sur le modèle probabiliste COSMO (« Communicating about Objects using Sensori-Motor Operations »).
Date : jeudi 9 juillet, 11h-12h.
Lien d’accès : https://amuskype.univ-amu.fr/deirdre.bolger/KS2XG07T

Evelina Fedorenko
2021-10-22 15:00 - 18:00 | via zoom
Le séminaire se tiendra en visioconférence via le lien : https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/91316230672
Code secret : [REDACTED]
The first lunch talk of the year will take place on 22 October from 3 to 4.30 pm and it will be in visio.
We will have the pleasure to listen to Evelina Fedorenko . You will find below the summary of her speech and the zoom link to connect.

The language system in the human brain.

The goal of my research program is to understand the representations and computations that enable us to share complex thoughts with one another via language, and their neural implementation. A decade ago, I developed a robust new approach to the study of language in the brain based on identifying language-responsive cortex functionally in individual participants. Originally developed for fMRI, we have since extended this approach to other modalities, like intracranial recordings. Using this functional-localization approach, I identified and characterized a set of frontal and temporal brain areas that i) support language comprehension and production (spoken and written); ii) are robustly separable from the lower-level perceptual (e.g., speech processing) and motor (e.g., articulation) brain areas; iii) are spatially and functionally similar across diverse languages (>40 languages from 11 language families); and iv) form a functionally integrated system with substantial redundancy across different components. In this talk, I will highlight a few discoveries from the last decade and argue that the primary goal of language is efficient information transfer rather than enabling complex thought, as has been argued in one prominent philosophical and linguistic tradition (e.g., Wittgenstein, 1921; Berwick & Chomsky, 2016). I will use two kinds of evidence to make this argument. First, I will examine the relationship between language and other aspects of cognition, including social cognitive abilities and complex thought/reasoning. I will show that the language brain regions are highly selective for language over diverse non-linguistic processes while also showing a deep and intriguing link with a system that supports social cognition. And second, I will examine different properties of language and argue that language both has a) properties that make it well-suited for communication, and b) properties that make it not suitable for complex thought. Both of these lines of evidence support the communicative function of language, and suggest that the idea that language evolved to allow for more complexity in thought is unlikely.

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Temporal niches in auditory communication
2021-10-29 12:00 - 17:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Luc. H Arnal and Keith B. Doelling, Institut de l’Audition, Centre Pasteur, Paris XII.
Communication signals such as speech or music, are complex signals that exploit acoustic features in a wide array of timescales. The auditory system responds differently to each timescale creating opportunity for sound designers, composers and human talkers to exploit these temporal niches to manipulate listeners’ affective states and reactions. Exploring human perception and reactions to a wide range of time scales (from a few to hundreds of milli-seconds) we will show that fast (>30 Hz) and slow (<10 Hz) temporal regularities are processed in a very different manner by the human brain and rely on distinct neural mechanisms. On the one hand, stimuli with high frequency dynamics – such as alarm signals – temporally overload the auditory system to induce aversive percepts, arguably by driving the sustained propagation of information in a bottom-up manner. On the other hand, slower stimuli – as featured in musical rhythms – permit the development of anticipatory processes, relying on slower, top-down oscillatory mechanisms. By analyzing the temporal dynamics in the acoustics of signals with different communicative goals (alarm, music) and their impact on the human brain, we identify and characterize specific neural systems and mechanisms shaping the diversity of auditory communication niches in the temporal domain.

Aurélie Bidet-Caulet
2021-11-26 12:00 - 14:30 | FRUMAM, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
How does the human brain resist auditory distraction?
One main challenge for the attentive brain is to resist distracting information. Auditory distraction can result from predictable irrelevant information (e.g. ongoing background noise) or from unexpected, transient and salient distracting events (e.g. phone ring, fire alarm…). Using intracranial EEG, scalp EEG and MEG data combined with behavioral measures, we have investigated brain activities in the time and frequency domains to characterize the brain mechanisms involved in shielding from distraction, in the healthy, developing (children and ageing data), or dysfunctional (stroke or migraine patients) brain. I will present a first set of data showing that distinct inhibitory and facilitatory mechanisms support selective attention to reduce the impact of an irrelevant sound stream. Then, I will present data showing that the impact of an unexpected salient environmental sound results from a balance between top-down and bottom-up mechanisms of attention.

Language embodiment and relativity: Evidence in Chinese-English bilinguals
2022-01-14 12:00 - 15:00 | via zoom
Guillaume Thierry
Bangor University, Bangor, UK

As soon as we master a language, several of our cognitive abilities that do not readily require language to operate and are seemingly independent from it interact with language representations in a highly sophisticated fashion, reflecting the highly integrated nature of human cognition. Examples of such cognitive abilities are perception, attention, affective regulation, memory, reasoning, and decision making. Although it is intuitive that such cognitive functions continuously interact with language in many ways, there is a paucity of data regarding the nature of such interactions. The quest for data shedding light on these interactions is difficult, however, and experimental paradigms used in the past are often criticised due to insufficiently controlled materials and experimental tasks. For instance, language-based studies involving overt reports and questionnaires often fail to acknowledge that they cannot test cognitive effects beyond the realm of language, since all proceedings are language-mediated. Behavioural studies also regularly fail to establish the level of awareness involved in tasks which could strategically, and therefore artificially, involve language on a metacognitive level. Here, I will present data from a set of studies showcasing the intricate nature of language-cognition interaction in the human brain, and particularly that of bilingual individuals who have come to master a second language in life. I will show how some language representations acquired early in life (i.e., from the native language) are there for life, influencing human cognition in a wholly unconscious manner. I will also show how new representations acquired later in life (i.e., from a second language) compete with native language representations and influence cognition unconsciously and ubiquitously. In closing, I will attempt to assess the repercussions of our observations for linguistic relativity and embodied cognition theory.

Teaching an old word new tricks? Phonological updates in the bilingual mental lexicon
2022-02-04 12:00 - 15:00 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Isabelle Darcy
Indiana University / ILCB / IMéRA
Listening to speech in your native language is easy. Recognizing the words spoken in conversation is generally an automatic and smooth everyday process in the first language (L1). Even in noisy or otherwise less than ideal conditions, performance is surprisingly robust. But anyone who has attempted to follow a conversation in a second language (L2) knows how demanding this can be, even when you know all the words. Even for reasonably clear speech, identifying individual words out of the speech stream is difficult. Charles and Trenkic (2015) reported that international university students missed about 30% of the words they heard during lectures.
For bilinguals, the perceptual processing of L2 speech sounds and the stored representations of the words themselves are influenced by the L1. For example, two words such as “lake” and “rake” may sound the same and may be stored as one word (= one homophonous pronunciation /leik/ for two concepts) for Japanese learners of English, because the /r/-/l/ distinction is difficult to perceive and represent for them due to the lack of this distinction in their L1. One consequence of these effects is the difficulty to know which word to activate when hearing /leik/, but also the difficulty to learn to pronounce the words differently.
Yet, many questions remain as to how bilinguals store the phonological form of words (their pronunciation) in the corresponding lexical entry in long-term memory, and how these representations change over time. Our lab has obtained evidence for dissociations between perception and lexical storage, which suggest that even after perception of a difficult phonological dimension improves, modifying lexical representations that use this phonological dimension remains hard. This means that even after a Japanese learner learns to distinguish /r/ from /l/, their representations of the words might still be the same.
In this talk I will outline research conducted in my lab to understand the phonological structure of the bilingual mental lexicon, how words are stored, and whether (and how) bilinguals are able to update previously inaccurate lexical representations.

How do people interpret implausible sentences?
2022-03-25 12:00 - 14:00 | FRUMAM, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Martin Pickering (Department of Psychology, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences)
Abstract:
People sometimes interpret implausible sentences nonliterally, for example treating “The mother gave the candle the daughter” as meaning the daughter receiving the candle. But how do they do so? We contrasted a nonliteral syntactic analysis account, according to which people compute a syntactic analysis appropriate for this nonliteral meaning, with a nonliteral semantic interpretation account, according to which they arrive at this meaning via purely semantic processing. The former but not the latter account postulates that people consider not only a literal-but-implausible double-object (DO) analysis in comprehending “The mother gave the candle the daughter”, but also a nonliteral-but-plausible prepositional-object (PO) analysis (i.e., including to before the daughter). In three structural priming experiments, participants heard a plausible or implausible DO or PO prime sentence. They then answered a comprehension question first or described a picture of a dative event first. In accord with the nonliteral syntactic analysis account, priming was reduced following implausible sentences than following plausible sentences and following nonliterally interpreted implausible sentences than literally interpreted implausible sentences. The results suggest that comprehenders constructed a nonliteral syntactic analysis, which we argue was predicted early in the sentence.

The role of laughter in human social interactions
2022-04-29 12:00 - 13:00 | FRUMAM, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Sophie Scott (Director, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL)
In this talk I will explore the neuroscience and evolution of laughter, a positive emotional vocalisation. I will draw parallels between human use of laughter and laugher and play vocalisations in other mammals, and I will also show some distinct differences between humans and other animals. I will explore the neural basis of laughter processing and discuss how this may relate to some individual differences in laughter use and experience.

Language in the brain and algorithms.
2022-10-07 12:00 - 13:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Jean-Rémi KING : Chercheur à l’Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris et Meta AI.
It took less than five years for AI to revolutionize the field of natural language processing. Can the resulting algorithms help us understand this complex cognitive ability? Here, we develop state-of-the-art language models and compare them to the adult human brain. To do so, we are integrating large-scale datasets of magneto/electroencephalography, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and intracranial recordings while individuals read or listen to natural sentences. Our analyses demonstrate systematic similarities between AI models and the brain, which allow us to (1) efficiently decode speech from brain activity and (2) delineate the location and temporal course of the hierarchy of language representations. Overall, these studies show how the interface between AI and neuroscience sheds new light on the computations at the heart of human language.

Typology of multilinguals' languages and its relation to brain and cognition
2022-11-18 12:00 - 13:00 | B011 LPL, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Olga Kepinska : Universität Wien
Learning and using additional languages has been time and again shown to be related to functional and structural changes to the brain. One aspect of multilingualism that has not been examined systematically so far is the typology of multilinguals’ languages: Do differences and similarities between languages multilinguals know contribute to the development of their cognition and brain? In this talk, I will discuss a methodology for describing the continuum of multilingual language experience that accounts for typological distance. We applied it in two studies with groups with diverse language backgrounds. In the first, we investigated n = 162 5-6-year-olds with various language backgrounds on a monolingual-to-quintilingual continuum. Overlaps in lexical distances between participants’ languages were found to be related to aspects of their dominant-language lexical knowledge and to brain activation patters during a dominant-language lexical task. In the second study, we looked at typological distance at the level of phonology and its relation to brain structure. In particular, we investigated how neuroanatomical indices describing the transverse temporal gyrus (TTG, cortical structure housing early auditory cortex) were related to cross-linguistic phonological information of n = 136 adult participants exposed to between 1 to 7 languages. We found that language experience with phonologically distant languages was associated with cortical thickness of the second TTG. These results refine our understanding of the neural underpinnings of multilingual language experience and will be discussed in the larger context of genetic versus environmental influences on the brain.

Towards a computational neurophysiology of covert auditory processing in health and disease
2022-12-09 12:00 - 13:00 | SALLE 15-409, Université Aix-Marseille 3 Pl. Victor Hugo,, Marseille, 13003, France
Le lunch talk Jean-Julien Aucouturier, est annulé en raison des perturbations dans les transports.
Nous sommes sincèrement désolé pour cette annulation de dernière minute.
Bien à vous
Etienne Thoret
________________________________________________________________________________________________
Jean-Julien Aucouturier
Abstract: The past 10 years have seen the emergence in the cognitive neuroscience community of a novel class of ‘data-driven’ methods inspired by psychophysical reverse-correlation, which allow researchers to model a participant’s behavioral responses to arbitrarily generated visual or auditory stimuli (Adolphs et al. 2016). Taking the example of some of our recent results on the perception of speech prosody (Ponsot et al., PNAS 2018; Goupil et al. Nature Communications 2021), I will show how to extend these new methodologies to the analysis of neurophysiological data, in order to identify the sensory mechanisms that underly covert auditory processing in both healthy participants, stroke and coma patients.
Bio: Jean-Julien Aucouturier was trained at SONY Computer Science Laboratories with François Pachet and holds a PhD in Computer Science from Université Pierre et Marie Curie (2006). JJ has then held several postdoctoral positions in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Tokyo with Takashi Ikegami and at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute with Kazuo Okanoya. After a decade at IRCAM in Paris where he directed the ERC-funded CREAM music neuroscience team, he is now Directeur de recherche CNRS (equiv. Full Professor) at the FEMTO-ST Institute (CNRS/Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté) in Besançon, France. His research program in FEMTO-ST is based on data-driven, system-science approaches to clinical neurophysiology, with a focus on the auditory/speech modality, and health technology applications in neurology and psychiatry. Lab website: https://neuro-team-femto.github.io

Neural encoding of speech sounds in neonates and infants: developmental trajectory and modulating factors
2023-01-20 12:00 - 13:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Carles Escera
(1)Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group, Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychobiology, University of Barcelona,
(2)Institute of Neurosciences, University of Barcelona,
(3) Institut de Recerca Sant Joan de Déu (IRSJD), Esplugues de Llobregat, Barcelona
Sites:
www.ub.edu/brainlab
http://www.neurociencies.ub.edu/the-auditory-motor-emotional-and-numerical-brain/
https://www.irsjd.org/ca/recerca/28/neurociencia-cognitiva

ABSTRACT
Infants master their native language with remarkable ease, following a common developmental trajectory across different languages and cultures. There is ample consensus on critical behavioral attainments at given time points during development, such as cooing (1-4 months), babbling (6-10 months) and uttering the first words (12 months). Yet, the underlying neural underpinnings of these language attainments are poorly understood. The acquisition of spoken language requires a sophisticated neural machinery to disentangle the fine-grained spectro-temporal acoustic features differentiating speech sounds. This neural machinery is partially functional in utero, from the 27th gestational week, and keeps its natural maturation processes under genetic, biological, nutritional and environmental influences. From the very same moment of birth, the baby is exposed to a much richer acoustic environment (the mother’s bomb behaves as low-pass filter), fostering rapid experience-dependent plastic changes in the neural encoding of complex sound features, that I will argue, support early language acquisition.
In my talk I will discuss the results of a series of studies carried out in my laboratory with the Frequency-Following Response (FFR), a non-invasive scalp-recorded auditory evoked potential that reflects compound phase-locked neural activity elicited to the spectrotemporal components of the acoustic signal, along the entire auditory hierarchy. These studies have so-far allowed us to establish the standards for recording the neonatal FFR in a hospital routine, to show that fundamental frequency (F0) encoding is adult-like at birth whereas temporal-fine structure encoding shows a striking maturation at the age of one month, to continue to develop up to the age of 6 months, and that fetal conditions challenging normal fetal growth, such as fetal growth restriction of fetal overweight, result in compromised neural encoding of F0 at birth. Furthermore, our results show that the prenatal exposure to environmental music –and to a mono/bilingual acoustic environment- during pregnancy, fosters the neural encoding of speech sounds (F0) at birth. Altogether, these result support the FFR as a powerful to investigate the neural underpinnings of early language acquisition.
Funding. Project PID2021-122255NB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/ FEDER, UE; Fundación Alicia Koplowitz; 2022AR-IRSJDCdTorres; ICREA Acadèmia.

Stimulating speech: auditory-motor interactions in perception and production
2023-02-03 12:00 - 13:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Kate WATKINS Professeure à l’Université d’Oxford
I will describe a series of experiments employing non-invasive brain stimulation in combination with measures of brain function, which explore how motor-to-sensory and sensory-to-motor interactions can be modulated during speech perception and production tasks.
To study the role of the motor cortex in speech perception, we use transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to temporarily disrupt the motor cortex representations of the articulators. We then record the effects of this disruption on speech perception using behaviour, EEG and MEG. We found that the motor cortex contributes to early stages of speech processing in the auditory cortex but not to processing of non-speech stimuli. The early effects are left-lateralised and can be fine-tuned by attention. We recently explored these lateralised effects further using perception of lexical tones in Mandarin and non-tonal language speakers. The effect of speech motor cortex disruption is left-lateralised for tone perception in Mandarin speakers and right-lateralised for non-tonal language speakers.
We have also explored the effects of anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over speech motor cortex and the cerebellum on speech adaptation to a formant perturbation suggesting different contributions from these regions to the adaptation process.
Taken together our work demonstrates the strength of brain stimulation methods especially when used in combination with other measures. The work presented confirms the importance of interactions between motor and sensory systems that are necessary for both speech perception and production.

Neural dynamics of feedforward and feedback speech processing
2023-03-10 12:00 - 13:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Adeen Flinker, PhD, New York University, Grossman School of Medicine, Tandon School of Engineering
Speech production is a complex human function requiring continuous feedforward commands together with reafferent feedback processing. The cortical organization of these processes are largely characterized by dual stream models of speech (Hickok & Poeppel 2007, Rauschecker & Scott 2009), wherein Frontal cortex mainly serves as an articulatory network mapping feedforward commands. Leveraging human intracranial recordings, I will present a series of studies addressing the role of prefrontal cortex in processing feedforward and feedback speech commands in support of a mixed representation across frontal cortex. I will argue for a functional subdivision of precentral gyrus wherein the ventral division sends feedforward commands and serves as the source of a corollary discharge, while the dorsal division carries out auditory feedback processing of reafferent speech.

Voices in the head: diversity of endophasia framed in a neurocognitive model
2023-05-05 12:00 - 13:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Hélène LOEVENBRUCK : Directrice de Recherche à l’Université Grenoble Alpes
“I am not a man, I am Cantona.”
“I love football.”
As you silently read these quotes, can you hear Eric Cantona’s voice? Can you imagine his next sentence?
Inner speech, or endophasia, can take various formats depending on the individual or the situation. It can feel expanded, like a little voice in the head, or rather condensed. It can occur as a monologue or a dialogue. It can seem intentional or irruptive. Recent data on atypical covert verbal forms, such as auditory verbal aphantasia (reported lack of inner voice), verbal hyperphantasia (reported vivid inner voice), and auditory verbal hallucination, challenge theories that postulate a universal quality of endophasia. In ConDialInt, a neurocognitive model rooted in a predictive control theory, such forms can be accounted for by considering a gradual variation along three essential dimensions: condensation, dialogality and intentionality. The inner voice phenomenon is seen as an exaptation of the sensory predictions involved in the control of overt speech. Speech production is considered to be hierarchically controlled, from conceptualisation to articulation, via formulation, motor planning and programming. At each level, control is based on the comparison between initial input and prediction. Endophasia is viewed as an interruption in the speech production process. Condensed forms emerge when the interruption occurs early, before the formulation stage. Expanded forms, inner voices, recruit the full production process, interrupted only prior to articulation. Dialogal forms are taken to include indexical and perspective properties. Intentional forms are seen as rigorously monitored predictions, whereas unintentional forms are loosely monitored. Agency feeling is assumed to rely on the timing of initial and predicted signals. The ConDialInt model is compatible with neuroanatomical data obtained for a variety of inner speech situations. It also accounts for atypical endophasia. Verbal hyperphantasia vs aphantasia are explained by variation in the condensation dimension. Auditory verbal hallucinations are construed as unintentional dialogal endophasia bestowed with a lack of agency. These propositions have implications for levels of representation in theories of language processing and cognition in general.

Here the zoom link : https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/87516300272?pwd=[REDACTED]
ID de réunion : 875 1630 0272
Code secret : [REDACTED]

Why we should care about the dorso-medial prefrontal cortex in language production
2023-06-02 11:00 - 17:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Stephanie Ries
Associate Professor, San Diego State University

The dorso-medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), including the supplementary and pre-supplementary motor areas as well as the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, has been a region of interest in studies of cognitive control and other areas of neuroscience for many years. Yet, traditional models of language production do not typically include this brain region, and its potential role in language and speech production has therefore only been more recently investigated. In this talk, I will review evidence from several research groups (including but not limited to my own) using fMRI, brain stimulation, and scalp and intracranial EEG in “monolinguals” and bilinguals with and without neurological damage that suggest that the dmPFC may play a bigger role than we previously had thought in language production. In particular, it seems likely involved in a response selection mechanism potentially taking place separately from lexical selection, in addition to speech monitoring. The implications of these findings for traditional cognitive models of language production will be discussed.

https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/83037452791?pwd=[REDACTED]
ID de réunion : 830 3745 2791
Code secret : [REDACTED]
