ILCB

Analyzing, Cognitive, and Neural Modeling of Language-Related Brain Potentials by Peter Beim Graben
2015-12-15 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Analyzing, Cognitive, and Neural Modeling of Language-Related Brain Potentials by Peter Beim Graben (Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
How is the human language faculty neurally implemented in the brain? What are the neural correlates of linguistic computations? To which extent are neuromorphic cognitive architectures feasible and could they eventually lead to new diagnosis and treatment methods in clinical linguistics (such as linguistic prosthetics)? These questions interfacing neurolinguistics with computational linguistics and computational neuroscience are addressed by the emergent discipline of computational neurolinguistics. In my presentation I will give an overview about my own research in computational neurolinguistics in the framework of language-related brain potentials (ERPs). By means of a paradigmatic ERP experiment for the processing and resolution of local ambiguities in German [1], I first introduce a novel method to identifying ERP components such as the P600 as ""recurrence domains"" in neuronal dynamics [2]. In a second step, I use a neuro-computational approach, called ""nonlinear dynamical automaton"" NDA [1] in order to construct a context-free ""limited repair parser"" [3] for processing the linguistic stimuli of the study. Finally, I demonstrate how the time-discrete evolution of the NDA can be embedded into continuous time using winner-less competition in neural population models [4]. This leads to a representation of the automaton's configurations as recurrence domains in the neural network that can be correlated with experimentally measured ERPs through subsequent statistical modeling [5,6]

Learning to take turns : The role of linguistic and interactional cues in children's conversation by Marisa Casillas
2016-01-22 08:00 - 17:00 (Europe/Paris) | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Learning to take turns : The role of linguistic and interactional cues in children’s conversation by Marisa Casillas (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics)
Children begin taking turns with their caregivers long before their first words emerge. But as their turns begin to change from vocalizations to true, verbal utterances, children face a major challenge in integrating linguistic cues into their previously functional non-verbal turn-taking systems. I will present an overview of children's turn-taking behaviors from infancy through young childhood and will review recent corpus and experimental work on how children's response timing is affected by linguistic planning and how their spontaneous predictions about upcoming turns change as they develop.

Dissociating Prediction and Attention Components in Language by Ruth de Diego-Balaguer
2016-02-26 10:00 - 12:00 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Dissociating Prediction and Attention Components in Language by Ruth de Diego-Balaguer (ICREA Research Professor – Cognition and Brain Plasticity Unit, Universitat de Barcelona)
Speech is composed of sequences of syllables, words and phrases. These elements unfold in time in specific orders. Thus, acquiring a language requires not only learning each of these representations but also their temporal organisation. The areas conforming the dorsal stream in language has been proposed to have a role in the processing of sequential information. In this talk I will present novel behavioural, developmental and neuroimaging evidence indicating that the roles of the fronto-parietal and fronto temporal connectivity within this dorsal stream can be dissociated in language learning. In addition, I will present data indicating that learning non-adjacent dependencies in language, a core mechanism for the acquisition of syntactic rules, involves both the ability to predict forthcoming elements implicitly and to endogenously orient attention based on the predictive cues learned. This type of learning implies the interface between the language and attention networks during the early stages of language acquisition.

Perceptual adaptation and speech motor control: A new perspective on some well known mechanisms by Douglas Shiller
2016-02-26 11:00 - 13:00 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Perceptual adaptation and speech motor control: A new perspective on some well known mechanisms by Douglas Shiller (Université de Montréal, Faculté de médecine)
Acoustic speech signals are notoriously variable within and between talkers. To aid in the linguistic decoding of such noisy signals, it is well known that listeners employ a number of perceptual mechanisms to help reduce the impact of linguistically irrelevant acoustic variation. Rapid perceptual accommodation to differences in age and gender is achieved, in part, through vowel-extrinsic normalization, whereby the immediately preceding speech signal provides a frame-of-reference within which talker-specific vowel category boundaries are determined (Ladefoged & Broadbent, 1957). Listeners also draw upon higher-order linguistic information to facilitate phonetic processing of noisy or ambiguous speech acoustic signals, as illustrated by the well-known lexical effect on perceptual category boundaries (Ganong, 1980).
Since their discovery many decades ago, these adaptive perceptual mechanisms have been considered primarily as processes supporting the decoding of ambiguous speech signals originating from other talkers. Here, I will describe two recent studies demonstrating that such adaptive processes can also alter the processing of self-generated speech acoustic signals (i.e., auditory feedback), and by extension, the sensorimotor control of speech production. The results provide strong support for the idea that short-term auditory-perceptual plasticity rapidly transfers to the sensory processes guiding speech motor function. The findings will be discussed within the context of current models of speech production, in particular those that highlight a role for auditory-feedback in the fine-tuning of predictive, feed-forward control processes.

Annotating Information Structure in Authentic Data: From Expert Annotation to Crowd Sourcing Experiments by Detmar Meurers, Kordula De Kuthy (University of Tübingen)
2016-06-10 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Annotating Information Structure in Authentic Data: From Expert Annotation to Crowd Sourcing Experiments by Detmar Meurers, Kordula De Kuthy (University of Tübingen)
While the formal pragmatic concepts in information structure, such as the focus of an utterance, are precisely defined in theoretical linguistics and potentially very useful in conceptual and practical terms, it has turned out to be difficult to reliably annotate such notions in corpus data (Ritz et al., 2008; Calhoun et al., 2010). We present a large-scale focus annotation effort designed to overcome this problem. Our annotation study is based on the tasked-based corpus CREG (Ott et al., 2012), which consists of answers to explicitly given reading comprehension questions. We compare focus annotation by trained annotators with a crowd-sourcing setup making use of untrained native speakers. Given the task context and an annotation process incrementally making the question form and answer type explicit, the trained annotators reach substantial agreement for focus annotation. Interestingly, the crowd-sourcing setup also supports high-quality annotation, for specific subtypes of data. To refine the crowd-sourcing setup, we introduce the Consensus Cost as a measure of agreement within the crowd. We investigate the usefulness of Consensus Cost as a measure of crowd annotation quality both intrinsically, in relation to the expert gold standard, and extrinsically, by integrating focus annotation information into a system performing Short Answer Assessment taking into account the Consensus Cost. Finally, we turn to the question whether the relevance of focus annotation can be extrinsically evaluated. We show that automatic short-answer assessment indeed significantly improves for focus annotated data.

Semantic processing beyond categories: Influences of semantic richness, associations and social-communicative contexts on language production by Rasha Abdel Rahman
2016-07-01 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Semantic processing beyond categories: Influences of semantic richness, associations and social-communicative contexts on language production by Rasha Abdel Rahman (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
The ultimate goal of speaking is to convey meaning. However, while semantic-categorical relations are well-investigated, little is known about other aspects of meaning processing during speech planning. In this talk I will present evidence on how message-inherent attributes, for instance, the semantic richness or emotional content of the message, shape language production. Furthermore, I will discuss the flexible nature of the language production system that can adapt to different contexts from ad-hoc relations to associations and social-communicative situations. Together, these findings demonstrate a high level of flexibility of the language production system as a basis for intimate - and thus far underinvestigated - relations between language production, emotion and social cognition.

Man and Machine during Natural Language Processing: A Neurocognitive Approach by Chris Biemann and Markus J. Hofmann
2016-12-02 11:00 - 13:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Man and Machine during Natural Language Processing: A Neurocognitive Approach by Chris Biemann and Markus J. Hofmann Language Technology, Universität Hamburg General and Biological Psychology, University of Wuppertal
While state-of-the-art NLP models lack a theory that systematically accounts for human performance at all levels of linguistic analysis, Neurocognitive Simulation Models of orthographic and phonological memory so far lacked a level of implemented semantic representations. To overcome these limitations, the authors of this talk decided to initiate a long-standing cooperation.

In part 1 of this talk, we introduce unsupervised methods from language technology that capture semantic information. We present a range of methods that extract semantic representation from corpora, as opposed to using manually created norms. We show how we applied language models based on n-grams, topic modelling, and the word2vec neural model across three different corpora to account for behavioral, brain-electric and eye movement data. We used a benchmark that has become standard for Neurocognitive Simulation Models in psychology: Thus we reproducibly accounted for half of the item-level variance in the cloze-completion-based word predictability from sentence context, and the resulting N400-, and single fixation duration data of the Potsdam sentence corpus.

In part 2 we discuss how relatively straightforward NLP methods can be used to define semantic processes in a neurocognitive simulation model. To extend an interactive activation model with a semantic layer, we used the log likelihood that two words occur more often together in the sentences of a large corpus than predictable by single-word frequency. The resulting Associative Read-Out Model (AROM) is an extension of the Multiple Read-Out Model. Here, we use it to account for association ratings and semantically induced false memories in human performance and P200/N400 brain-electric data. Then, we present a sequential version of the AROM accounting for primed lexical decision, and the resulting semantic competition in the left (and right!) inferior frontal gyrus of the human brain. Finally, we envision two routes of reading, complementing the form-based aspects of linguistic representations with one of the most defining feature of words: they carry meaning.

Figures of speech in the brain: The role of metaphoricity, familiarity, concreteness, and lateralization in language comprehension by Bálint Forgács
2016-12-09 11:00 - 13:00 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Figures of speech in the brain: The role of metaphoricity, familiarity, concreteness, and lateralization in language comprehension by Bálint Forgács (Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception (LPP) Université Paris Descartes)
Debates are hot regarding how metaphors are related to literal language, in what steps we understand them, and how our brains deal with them. In my talk I am going to show fMRI and divided visual half field data arguing against a unique role for the right cerebral hemisphere and literal language in metaphor comprehension. If the relevant psycholinguistic factors are controlled for (such as context, emotional valence or imageability) classical left lateralized regions seem to compute not just dead, but even novel metaphors. Moreover, the latter do not seem to evoke the so called electrophysiological concreteness effect either, contrary to the claims of the strong version of embodiment. Based on the new evidence I am going to present a novel model of how the neural systems dedicated to language could compute figures of speech so swiftly and quickly, and why the lateralization debate could be viewed from a different perspective.

Learning new words: Implications for speech processing and for lexical memory by James M. McQueen
2017-01-23 14:30 - 16:00 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Learning new words: Implications for speech processing and for lexical memory by James M. McQueen (Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands)
lle et al., 2012; Schwartze & Kotz, 2013). I will discuss new empirical and patient evidence (motor-auditory coupling and auditory only) in support of these considerations and present an extended cortico-subcortical framework encompassing action-perception coupling, perception, and multimodal speech.
ur, Aix-en-Provence LPL
Listeners are able to recognise words in spite of considerable variation in how words are realized physically. For example, Mary may need to recognise an English word spoken by Jacques, a non-native speaker that Mary has never heard before. Evidence from behavioural (eye-tracking) and neuroscientific (EEG and fMRI) studies on novel word learning will be presented which suggests that listeners cope with the variation in spoken words through abstracting away from the episodic details of particular experienced word forms. This process can be seen in on-line speech recognition: the way a novel realization of a new word is processed is based on phonological knowledge previously abstracted from other words. The need for abstraction also shapes lexical memory: sleep-enhanced memory consolidation processes support the transfer of newly-learned words from episodic memory to long-term lexical memory, making generalization across modalities possible. Listeners can recognise, for example, newly-learned words that they have previously read but that they have never heard before.

The referential value of prosody: A comparative approach to the study of animal vocal communication by Piera Filippi
2017-02-01 11:00 - 13:00 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
The referential value of prosody: A comparative approach to the study of animal vocal communication by Piera Filippi (blri)
Recent studies addressing animal vocal communication have challenged the traditional view of meaning in animal communication as the context-specific denotation of a call. These studies have identified a central aspect of animal vocal communication in the ability to recognize the emotional state of signalers, or to trigger appropriate behaviors in response to vocalizations. This theoretical perspective is conceptually sound from an evolutionary point of view, as it assumes that, rather than merely referring to an object or an event, animals’ vocalizations are designed to trigger (intentionally, or not) reactions that may be adaptive for both listeners and signalers. Crucially, changes in emotional states may be reflected in prosodic modulation of the voice. Research focusing on the expression of emotional states through vocal signals suggests that prosodic correlates of emotional vocalizations are shared across mammalian vocal communication systems. In a recent empirical study, we showed that human participants use specific acoustic correlates (differences in fundamental frequency and spectral center of gravity) to judge the emotional content of vocalizations across amphibia, reptilia, and mammalia. These results suggest that fundamental mechanisms of vocal emotional expression are widely shared among vocalizing vertebrates and could represent an ancient signaling system. But what’s the evolutionary link between the ability to interpret emotional information in animal vocalizations and the ability for human linguistic communication? I suggest to identify this link in the ability to modulate emotional sounds to the aim to trigger behaviors within social interactions. Hence, I will emphasize the key role of the interactional value of prosody in relation to the evolution and ontogenetic development of language. Within this framework, I will report on recent empirical data on humans, showing that the prosodic modulation of the voice is dominant over verbal content and faces in emotion communication. This finding aligns with the hypothesis that prosody is evolutionarily older than the emergence of segmental articulation, and might have paved the way to its origins. Finally, implications for the study of the cognitive relationship between linguistic prosody and the ability for music, which has often been identified as the evolutionary precursor of language, will be discussed.

Common ground for action-perception coupling and its consequences for speech processing
2017-02-09 11:00 - 12:30 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Common ground for action-perception coupling and its consequences for speech processing by Sonja A. Kotz (Dept. of Neuropsychology and Psychopharmacology, Maastricht University, The Netherlands & Dept. of Neuropsychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany)
Sonja.kotz@maastrichtuniversity.nl
11h
While the role of forward models in predicting sensory consequences of action is well anchored in a cortico-cerebellar interface, it is an open question whether this interface is action specific or extends to perceptual consequences of sensory input (e.g. Knolle et al., 2012; 2013 a&b). Considering the functional relevance of a temporo-cerebellar-thalamo-cortical circuitry that aligns with well known cerebellar-thalamo-cortical connectivity patterns, one may consider that cerebellar computations apply similarly to incoming information coding action, sensation, or even higher level cognition such as speech and language (e.g. Ramnani, 2006; Kotz & Schwartze, 2010, 2016): (i) they simulate cortical information processing and (ii) cerebellar-thalamic output may provide a possible source for internally generated cortical activity that predicts the outcome of information processing in cortical target areas (Knolle et al., 2012; Schwartze & Kotz, 2013). I will discuss new empirical and patient evidence (motor-auditory coupling and auditory only) in support of these considerations and present an extended cortico-subcortical framework encompassing action-perception coupling, perception, and multimodal speech.

Music and Language comprehension in the brain – a surprising connection by Richard Kunert
2017-04-28 14:00 - 17:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Music and Language comprehension in the brain – a surprising connection by Richard Kunert (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Radboud University Nijmegen, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior, Nijmegen)
RiKunert@googlemail.com

14h Salle des voûtes,
fac St Charles, Pôle 3 C
How the comprehension of instrumental music and spoken or written language is implemented in the brain remains mysterious.
In this talk I present a new way to approach this issue.
In a series of studies we investigated music and language comprehension at the same time in order to gain insights into both.
Specifically, we asked whether these two kinds of stimuli are subserved by common neural circuitry despite their obvious differences.
It turns out that structural properties of language and instrumental music are both processed in a common brain area.
Does this truly imply shared structural processing or is this just a general effect related to attention?
It turns out that the effects of music on attention are actually limited.
Overall, the findings I will present suggest that music and language processing share very limited, and surprisingly specialized neural circuitry.
Overall, an interdisciplinary approach, as applied here, can open the way for asking ever more focused questions about brain organization.

Discourse Prosody and Sentence Processing in Prelingually Deaf Teenagers with Cochlear Implants by Katherine Demuth
2017-05-09 17:30 - 19:00 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Discourse Prosody and Sentence Processing in Prelingually Deaf Teenagers with Cochlear Implants by Katherine Demuth
17h30 LPL,

The past few years has seen major improvements in the early diagnosis of hearing loss, early intervention, and device improvements.
Much of the assessment of language development has focussed on the early years,
with assessment of hearing levels, intelligibility, vocabulary size,
and other standardized measure showing good to excellent attainment levels by many children fitted with both hearing aids and cochlear implants (CIs).
However, much less is known about the language abilities of school-aged children with hearing loss,
where many still experience challenges making themselves understood, understanding others, and fully engaging in social interaction.
This talk discusses results from two recent studies of discourse interactions and sentence processing by prelingually deaf teenage CI users,
showing that they are less interactive, exhibit a different use prosodic cues for certain discourse functions,
and are much slower at sentence processing than their normal hearing peers.
This raises many questions regarding the nature of their language model, and how it might be enhanced to achieve more efficient language processing and production.

Deep learning models of perception and cognition by Marco Zorzi
2017-07-06 14:00 - 16:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Deep learning models of perception and cognition by Marco Zorzi (University of Padova, Italy)
Deep learning in stochastic recurrent neural networks with many layers of neurons (“deep networks”) is a recent breakthrough in neural computation research. These networks build a hierarchy of progressively more complex representations of the sensory data through unsupervised learning. Using examples from research in my laboratory, I will show that deep learning models represent a major step forward for connectionist modeling in psychology and cognitive neuroscience. I will also focus on a new model of letter perception, which shows that learning written symbols can recycle the visual primitives of natural images, thereby requiring only limited domain-specific tuning.

Zaven PARÉ
2020-05-29 11:00 - 13:00
Séminaire exceptionnel ILCB
Vendredi 29 Mai 2019, 11h00

Prof. Zaven Paré
Sonzai-Kan and Cognition (Behavior Monitoring Interpretation for Interaction Design)

Les capacités de jeu

La présentation porte sur les biais cognitifs dans des expérimentations mettant en jeu l’AI, la robotique et l’interaction sociale (avec ou sans embodiment) dans 4 configurations de jeux avec 4 dispositifs. Les quatre parties de mon plan illustrent séparément les problématiques de l’anthropomorphisation de l’action et de l’interaction.

La force brute abstraite : le jeu de Go
La rapidité algorithmique : le rubik’s cube
La rapidité mécanique : pierre-papier-ciseaux
Le potentiel social : les échecs

ATTENTION, ce séminaire aura lieu en ligne.
Pour y accéder, suivez le lien : https://amuskype.univ-amu.fr/thierry.chaminade/4HYYDS2N
Participer par téléphone : +33413554505
ID de conférence : 68560127

Vous aurez une petite installation à faire au préalable et des réglages de connexions, qu’il faudrait faire dès à présent. Pour des raisons d’organisation, prévoyez de vous connecter 10mns avant le début.

Bio
Actuellement résident de l’IMéRA, Zaven Paré travaille en tant qu’artiste et chercheur en design d’interaction. Il a inventé la marionnette électronique (oeuvres présentes dans des collections en France, en Suisse, en Italie, aux États Unis et en Russie). Ses dispositifs ont été utilisés dans des mises en scène de Valère Novarina (CalArts, Festival Henson, La Mama etc, Festival d’Avignon). Il a été collaborateur de chorégraphes (Marie Chouinard, Edouard Lock), pour le théâtre et le théâtre musical (Denis Marleau, Mauricio Kagel) et pour le ballet et l’opéra (Het National Ballet, Opéra Paris-Bastille). À partir de 2009, il participe au Robot Actors Project du professeur Hiroshi Ishiguro, dans le Intelligent Robotics Laboratory à l’Université d’Osaka et à ATR.
Il a été lauréat du French American Fund for Performing Arts au California Institute for the Arts, de la Villa Kujoyama, de la Japan Society for Promotion of Science, et l”invité d’honneur du dernier festival de marionnettes de Moscou. Il est l’auteur de L’âge d’or de la robotique Japonaise (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2016).

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Parallel orthographic processing and reading
2020-09-03 17:30 - 19:00 | CIRM – Luminy, 163 avenuede Luminy, Case 916, Marseille, 13288, France
Parallel orthographic processing and reading
Jonathan Grainger (Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive, CNRS & Aix-Marseille University Marseille)
In written languages that use an alphabetic script, orthographic processing lies at the heart of the reading process, enabling visual information to make contact with linguistic information. Indeed, reading can be viewed as a bi-directional interaction between the processing of visual and linguistic information, with orthographic processing serving as the crucial interface between the two. In the present talk, I will summarize the knowledge that has accrued concerning orthographic processing in single word reading before presenting more recent research on sentence reading and the processing of orthographic information spanning several words. In both lines of research, the key words are: parallel, cascaded, and interactive processing. For single word reading the interactivity involves position-coded letter identities and whole-word orthographic representations, and for sentence reading it extends to involve ordered word identities and higher-level sentence structures.

Understanding covert verbal actions as simulated verbal actions : Ladislas Nalborczyk , ILCB
2020-11-27 14:00 - 15:00
Mental imagery of actions or “motor imagery” is accompanied by subjective multisensory (e.g., auditory, visual, kinaesthetic) experience. For instance, while reading these words, you may experience the auditory sensation of an “inner voice” accompanying your reading. Since the first explorations of the phenomenological and psychophysiological properties of such imagined actions, there has been considerable efforts and progresses towards describing the mechanisms leading to these sensory percepts. An influential view suggests that these sensory percepts would result from the simulation or emulation of the corresponding motor action, reusing internal models developed for the control of overt actions. However, the precise computations required by these internal models (i.e., simulators or emulators) and their neural implementation is still unclear. Moreover, the simulationnist view raises the question of how is it possible for imagination of action not to lead to overt execution. In other words, despite the involvement of the motor system in providing the sensory experience of the covert action, how can we imagine raising our arm without actually raising our arm? By focusing on imagined (i.e., covert) verbal actions as a case study, we aim to better characterise the fundamental interplay between language, action, and perception.

Interpreting machine learning in hearing, communication and language sciences: why, how, and the current challenges
2021-02-11 12:00 - 14:30
Here is the link to the event : https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/99484117315?pwd=[REDACTED]
“Interpreting machine learning ? Why and how ? “
In the context of a cycle of talks organized by the ILCB post-docs, we are organising February, 11th (online) a talk/round table on interpretability.

This event is dedicated to be informal and aims to be a place for discussing our point of view and/or needs on interpretability, in the context of language and hearing sciences, but not only, all contributions and points of view are very welcome.

Please find below the original call with an updated program.

Here is the link to the event : https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/99484117315?pwd=[REDACTED]

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https://www.ilcb.fr/event/interpreting-machine-learning-in-hearing-communication-and-language-sciences-why-how-and-the-current-challenges/

Machine learning and deep neural networks have been raised as compelling models to simulate complex tasks in language, communication and brain sciences. But what do we really understand about these model and how they process information? As users, we often use them as tools without precisely understanding their mechanistic and representational underpinnings. It is now crucial to go through the interpretation of machine learning but interpreting might have different meaning: while perceptual researchers might aim to understand how a convolutional networks can be interpreted in terms of nonlinear filtering or brain activations like patterns, a language researcher might try to decipher the role and meaning of the recursive computations made by transformer networks.

The ILCB bridges research in language, communication and brain sciences all of which are susceptible of benefiting from the use of machine learning, with research in informatics and mathematics, directly concerned with machine learning as a topic in its own right.

Program :

12h/12h30 – Etienne Thoret (Post-doc ILCB, PRISM, LIS) – Deciphering the acoustical bases of hearing by interpreting biomimetic deep-neural-networks (20 min + 10 min)

12h30/13h – Philippe Blache (LPL) – Is language processing incremental? A comparison between Transformer and RNN-based language models and their ability to model human language processing. (20 min + 10 min)

13h/13h30 – Ronan Sicre (LIS) – Visual interpretability of deep neural networks: a brief overview. (20 min + 10 min)

13h30/13h45 Adrià Torrens (University of Ostrava) Building a grammar for gradient linguistic evaluative expressions: Do Machine learning, neuronal networks, and deep learning help? (10 min + 5min)

13h45/14h30 – Discussion (45 minutes)

Etienne Thoret,

Understanding the communication between the spoken and written language system from a network perspective
2021-04-08 12:00 - 13:00
Shuai Wang, Postdoc ILCB and Chotiga Pattamadilok, CNRS researcher, LPL
Abstract :
The left ventral occipitotemporal cortex, also named visual word form area, plays a key role in reading. Recent evidence suggests that it is also involved in different levels of speech processing, from phoneme analysis to sentence listening. Yet, little is known about the underlying mechanisms of this cross-modal activation and the communication between this area and the spoken language system. In this talk, we are going to introduce our on-going research that addresses these issues from a network perspective by 1) applying the Graph Theory on fMRI data, and 2) examining the temporal dynamics of the communication between areas within the spoken and written language system using an intracranial EEG protocol.

Comparing brains across individuals and species via cortical folding patterns
2021-04-22 12:00 - 14:30
KepKee and Olivier Coulon
Abstract:
A prominent feature of the human cerebral cortex is the presence of folds, or sulci. Even though cortical sulci look very different from one person to another, sulcal organisation is not at all random: it follows a topography that is highly conserved across human and nonhuman primates. Robust sulci-function relationships have mostly been demonstrated in the primary sulci (e.g. the central sulcus where the motor cortex is found), as these sulci tend to be more stable across individuals in terms of their shape, and relative positions on the cortex. In contrast, sulci-function links in secondary and tertiary sulci have been harder to study due to large inter-individual variabilities.With the advent of modern neuroimaging methods and an accumulation of MRI brain scans, it is now possible to characterize the spatial, geometric, and topological variations of cortical sulci across many individuals and species, and to study their links to brain function. This promising line of work has revealed novel relationships between sulci and functional brain areas at the individual level beyond primary sulci, that are generalised across primates. Such powerful sulci-function links provide an important means of bridging brains across individuals and species for comparisons.This seminar aims to provide an overview of :

How sulcal anatomy is important for revealing brain structure-function relationships across individuals and species, and;
The current methods and tools developed in our team for performing such sulcal analyses on MRI data.

In this seminar, we will present a series of three talks :

Talk 1: I will discuss recent evidence demonstrating that sulcal anatomy is an important means for localising functional areas across individuals and species.
Talk 2: Olivier and I will present a novel method that allows the cross-mapping of cortical surfaces across individuals, and species, based on common sulci for brain comparisons.
Talk 3: Finally, Olivier will present ongoing research about the links between the morphology of cortical folds, anatomical connectivity and function.

Video :

Linking Language evolution, language acquisition, and language diversity: How social and cognitive pressures shape learning and communication
2021-06-11 12:00 - 13:00
Limor Raviv (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics)
ABSTRACT:
What are the social, environmental, and cognitive pressures that shape the evolution of language in our species? Why are there so many different languages in the world? And how did this astonishing linguistic diversity come about?
These are some of the most interesting questions in the fields of cognitive science and linguistics, and represent the range of topics discussed in my research so far.
My work focuses on linking core aspects of language acquisition, language evolution, and language diversity using a range of novel behavioral paradigms and computational models.
My goal is to shed light on the communicative pressures and cognitive constraints (e.g., memory limitations, efficiency) that shape social interaction and language use in our species, and to identify the social, environmental, and cross-cultural factors (e.g., population size) that lead to language diversity and to cross-linguistic variation.
In this talk, I will provide an overview of my research in the past six years (including methods and results from selected projects), as well as present future directions and ongoing work.

The zoom link:

https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/2515421853?pwd=[REDACTED]

Exploring language development in autistic and TD children: individual differences, linguistic environment and conversational dynamics
2021-06-18 13:00 - 14:00
Riccardo Fusaroli (Interacting Minds Center, Aarhus University)
Le séminaire se tiendra en visioconférence via le lien : https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/2515421853?pwd=[REDACTED]
Language development is traditionally explored in terms of individual differences and/or linguistic environment. In this talk I will present a more comprehensive framework, where children actively engage and potentially the linguistic environment, and analogously adult speakers adapt to and engage the child production. I will also present initial investigations on a longitudinal corpus involving 32 autistic and 35 typically developing children followed for over 2 years between 2 and 5 years of age. The focus will be to predict language development relying on individual differences (e.g. verbal IQ, socialization skills), linguistic environment (amount of language, lexical richness, syntactic complexity) and conversational dynamics (linguistic alignment).

Anything but boring: How looking at tasks can tell us more about language development.
2021-07-02 12:00 - 13:00
Christina Bergmann (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics)
Le séminaire se tiendra en visioconférence via le lien : https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/2515421853?pwd=[REDACTED]
Abstract: Work that focuses on how we measure children’s knowledge may seem a hurdle towards discovery. In this talk, I will argue that inspecting the methods we use can tell us a great deal about the underlying mechanisms that generate measurable behavior, and highlight how these insights are key for theory building and computational modelling.

Summer school
2021-08-30 - 2021-09-03 | CIRM – Luminy, 163 avenuede Luminy, Case 916, Marseille, 13288, France

Language development as a joint process: Why the simultaneous learning of Form, Content, and Use is more a help than a hindrance
2021-10-08 12:00 | via zoom
Abdellah Fourta (Aix-Marseille University & INRIA Paris)
Abstract:
To acquire language, children need to learn form (e.g., phonology), content (e.g., word meaning), and use (e.g., finding the right words to convey a communicative intent). The scientific study of language development has traditionally studied these dimensions separately. Indeed, one could imagine that children first acquire the form, then associate form with content, and only then, learn how to use form and content adequately in a communicative context. The reality of the situation is that children have to deal with aspects of form, content and use simultaneously and experimental studies suggest that the timeline of acquisition of these dimensions largely overlap, indicating that children learn them in parallel, not one at a time. While this fact makes language acquisition seem even harder than we previously thought, here I argue that the joint learning of form, content, and use may be more a help than a hindrance, as these dimensions are interdependent in many ways and can therefore constrain/disambiguate each other. I will illustrate this idea based on my previous and current research combining both experimental and computational modeling.
Where: Zoom (send us an email to receive the link)

CoCoDev
2021-10-22 10:30 - 12:00 | via zoom
Kevin El Haddad is a researcher in affective computing and Human-Agent interaction at the University of Mons.
Abstract:
Smiles and laughs (S&L) are among the most frequent and informative non-verbal expressions used in our daily interactions. Their incorporation into machine’s communication skills is therefore a must in order to improve human-agent interaction (HAI) applications quality (among other aspects), whether it is on the detection/perception side or on the generation/production side.
This presentation will focus on our efforts aiming at providing a better understanding of S&L conversational dynamics as well as implementing them in HAI modules. We will present our contributions and ongoing work in synthesis, recognition and prediction technologies as well as resources we propose to the community with the hope that this same community will help us improve them through collaboration or other contributions.
I strongly believe that, with the limited resources available in the scientific communities, the more people get involved, the more we can accelerate the integration of S&L, and by extension nonverbal expressions in general, in HAI applications. So I look forward to meeting you during this talk.
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The zoom link: https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/2515421853

CoCoDev
2021-11-05 16:00 - 17:00 | via zoom
Production practice is more effective than comprehension for second language learning
Elise Hopman (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Abstract:
Whereas most classroom-based language instruction traditionally emphasizes comprehension-based learning, memory research suggests that language production activities may provide a stronger learning experience than comprehension practice, due to the meaningfully different task demands involved in producing versus comprehending language. Using both artificial and natural language learning experiments with adults, I show that production exercises are more effective than comprehension exercises for learning the vocabulary and grammar of a foreign language. I will discuss these findings in the broader context of research implying that production and production-like activities might play a privileged role during learning more generally.

CoCoDev
2021-11-12 16:00 - 17:00 | via zoom
BabyBERTa: Learning More Grammar With Small-Scale Child-Directed Language
Philip Huebner (University of Illinos, Urbana-Champaign)
Abstract:
Transformer-based language models have taken the NLP world by storm. However, their potential for addressing important questions in language acquisition research has been largely ignored. In this work, we examined the grammatical knowledge of RoBERTa (Liu et al., 2019) when trained on a 5M word corpus of language acquisition data to simulate the input available to children between the ages 1 and 6. Using the behavioral probing paradigm, we found that a smaller version of RoBERTa-base that never predicts unmasked tokens, which we term BabyBERTa, acquires grammatical knowledge comparable to that of pre-trained RoBERTa-base – and does so with approximately 15X fewer parameters and 6,000X fewer words. We discuss implications for building more efficient models and the learnability of grammar from input available to children. Lastly, to support research on this front, we release our novel grammar test suite that is compatible with the small vocabulary of child-directed input.

CoCoDev
2021-12-03 12:00 - 14:00 | via zoom
TBA

Okko Räsänen (Tampere University)

TBA
2021-12-17 12:00 - 14:00 | via zoom
Jonathan Ginzburg (Université de Paris)
