Understanding the communication between the spoken and written language system from a network perspective
2021-04-08 12:00 - 13:00 (Europe/Paris)
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=elpEeVhxRTV5b01rZGUxaWY4Qy9ZQT09

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=elpEeVhxRTV5b01rZGUxaWY4Qy9ZQT09
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=elpEeVhxRTV5b01rZGUxaWY4Qy9ZQT09
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)

TBA
2022-01-28 12:00 - 14:00 | via zoom
Asli Ozyurek (Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior)

Seminar on “speech production and perception”
2022-05-05 - 2022-05-06 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Prof. F. Guenther and REaDY team, LPL (5-6 May)
Thursday, May 5th 2022
Discussion with Prof. F. Guenther around the following presentations
14h-14h40 : Noël Nguyen & Kristof Strijkers : Phonetic and semantic convergence in speech communication
14h40-15h10 : Serge Pinto: Studying speech motor control from its impairment: the cases of hypo- and hyperkinetic dysarthrias
15h10-15h30 : Coffee break
15h30-16h10 : Elin Runnqvist, Lydia Dorokhova & Snezana Todorović : Action monitoring from tongue movements to words
16h10-16h40 : Anne-Sophie Dubarry : Exploring the variability of neurophysiological data during language processing

Friday, May 6th 2022, 10h30-12h00
KEYNOTE by Prof. F. Guenther
(Director of Speech Neuroscience Lab, Boston University)
Neurocomputational modeling of speech production
Speech production is a highly complex sensorimotor task involving tightly coordinated processing in the frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes of the cerebral cortex. To better understand these processes, our laboratory has designed, experimentally tested, and iteratively refined a neural network model, called the DIVA model, whose components correspond to the brain regions involved in speech. Babbling and imitation phases are used to train neural mappings between phonological, articulatory, auditory, and somatosensory representations. After the imitation phase, the model can produce learned phonemes and syllables by generating movements of an articulatory synthesizer. An extended version of the model, called GODIVA, addresses the neural circuitry underlying the buffering and sequencing of phonological units in multi-syllabic utterances. Because the model’s components correspond to neural populations and are given precise anatomical locations, activity in the model’s neurons can be compared directly to neuroimaging data. Computer simulations of the model account for a wide range of experimental findings, including data on acquisition of speaking skills, articulatory kinematics, and brain activity during normal and perturbed speech. Furthermore, “damaged” versions of the model are being used to investigate several communication disorders, including stuttering, apraxia of speech, and hypokinetic dysarthria

Prosody as a beacon for understanding a speaker's stance and intentions
2022-09-27 11:00 - 12:00 | B011 LPL, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Marc D. Pell, de l’Université McGill
Prof. Pell’s research investigates how adults communicate their emotions, attitudes, or other social intentions while speaking, to better understand the social-pragmatic context of spoken language.
Much of his work focuses on the effects of the human voice during pragmatic language processing and in social cognition. Members of his lab are exploring the neurocognitive basis of vocal communication, how this system is influenced by socio-cultural factors, and how vocal communication is influenced by acquired disease of the brain (e.g., Parkinson’s disease, repetitive head injury). Behavioural paradigms, acoustic analysis, neuroinvestigative techniques (ERPs, fMRI), and neuropsychological assessments of brain-damaged adults are being used to test these ideas.

Séminaire & Soutenance HDR Isabelle Dautriche
2023-01-13 10:00 - 18:30 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
10H Judit Gervain (University of Padoa, Italy & CNRS)
How do infants represent speech: the developmental origins of the embedded neural oscillations model
The proposal (Giraud & Poeppel 2012) that a hierarchy of embedded neural oscillations support speech and language processing in the brain has received ample evidence in adults. However, the developmental orgins of such a neural architecture remain to a large extent unknown. The talk will present EEG data from newborns and older infants showing that neural oscillations are already in place early in development and are shaped by prenatal and postnatal experience.
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11H Coffee break
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11H30 Luca Bonatti (University Pompeu Fabra, Spain)
The role of logic in infant cognition

Do infants have a logic in their mind, and what role could it have in their cognitive system? David Hume argued that no novel content can arise by simply inspecting ‘relations of ideas’ — what we would now call logic, but only by knowing ‘matters of fact’ – objects, events, causal relations. This creates a puzzle: how is it possible that a system that adds no novel knowledge be useful to our cognition of the world? I will argue that the puzzle is a bit less puzzling if one thinks that knowledge is not acquired not only by adding novel information, but also by reducing uncertainty. I will present experiments with adults and infants suggesting that elementary logical processes are indeed spontaneously triggered in different contexts, and precisely serve the role of reducing uncertainty by eliminating possibilities.
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12H30 Lunch ILCB
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14H Soutenance HDR, Isabelle Dautriche (CNRS & Aix-Marseille University)
How children learn the meaning of words
One central task in most linguistic theory is to provide an account of the acquisition of language: What kind of machine in its initial state, supplied with what kinds of input, could acquire a natural language in the way that infants of our species do? This question is usually confined to the acquisition of phonology and syntax, leaving vocabulary aside. After all, words must be learnt by noticing the real-world contingencies for their use. No other theory could explain why English children learn to associate the sound sequence /ˈbɛtə/ to the meaning “better” and Turkish children to “worse”. I argue that focusing on distributional or statistical abilities provides an incomplete picture of word learning as it fails to account for how learning occurs, what kind of knowledge learners bring into the word learning problem and what properties of language may facilitate it. I will present experimental and computational work that suggest that 1) children are active learners, able to combine and weigh several sources of information while learning the meaning of words; 2) that the vocabulary of natural languages has evolved to be more learnable by infants and 3) that infants come equipped with non-linguistic biases that guide their learning, some of which may be shared with other species.
Committee:
Jennifer Culbertson, University of Edinburgh
Balthasar Bickel, University of Zurich
Luca Bonatti, University Pompeu Fabra
Judit Gervain, University of Padoa & CNRS
Noël Nguyen, Aix-Marseille Université
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17H Apéro

Apprentissage lexical chez les enfants en maternelle et en élémentaire: mécanismes en jeu et efficacité des méthodes d'interventions en classe
2023-05-03 10:00 - 11:00 | SALLE 9-051, Université Aix-Marseille Campus St Charles 3 Pl. Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13003, France
Intervenante : Séverine Casalis, SCALab, Univ Lille & CNRS (pour plus d’infos : https://pro.univ-lille.fr/severine-casalis)
Abstract
L’objectif de l’exposé est de présenter de façon parallèle une synthèse de modèles et travaux expérimentaux conduits sur l’apprentissage lexical d’une part et d’études interventionnelles conduites en classe d’autre part. L’apprentissage de mots est conçu, théoriquement, de façon sensiblement différente, chez les très jeunes et jeunes enfants et chez les enfants d’âge maternelle. En conséquence, nous présenterons successivement les modèles de « fast mapping » (Chiat, 2001) rendant compte de l’apprentissage lexical chez le très jeune enfant et le modèle « Complementary System Account » (Lindsay & Gaskell, 2010) qui rend compte des mécanismes d’apprentissage lexical chez l’adulte et l’enfant plus âgé. Cette distinction entre mécanismes d’apprentissage lexical selon l’âge de l’enfant est également justifiée par le rôle que joue l’orthographe dans le développement du lexique, à la fois en termes de configuration lexicale et de type d’exposition. L’apprentissage de la lecture, avec notamment l’impact de l’orthographe et l’exposition aux textes écrits modifie également les interventions réalisées en classe, souvent basées sur les textes écrits à partir du cycle 3. Cette synthèse se conclura par les perspectives de recherche ouvertes par l’articulation entre les travaux de fondamentaux et les interventions en classe.
Participer par Zoom
https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/85283430679?pwd=RCtzdVQxR1ZiaCtIa2tkYnp4QmFNQT09
ID de réunion : 852 8343 0679
Code secret : 527701

Word learning in honor of Lila Gleitman: Perception of structure from language and world
2023-06-09 09:00 - 11:00 | Salle 9-050, Université Aix-Marseille Campus St Charles 3 Pl. Victor Hugo, Marseille, France
John Trueswell (Dept of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania)
Abstract: It is tempting to conclude that children learn the meanings of words by observing their circumstances of use (e.g., observing that the word “dog” often co-occurs with dog-sightings). If this is the case though, how do children ever learn the vast majority of the words that they know? Consider most of the words in this abstract, many of which a 3-year-old produces and understands: like “what”, “not”, “language”, “do”, “think”, “learn.” Can these words be learned by observation of their circumstances of use? There are no what-sightings that go with “what”, and no not-sightings that go with “not”; thinking-sightings often look like sleeping-sightings and sitting-sightings. How do children go about learning these “hard words” despite no explicit instruction? I will present research, some of which was done with my longtime collaborator Lila Gleitman, that is designed to answer these questions. I’ll focus on the unexpected role that word-to-world pairings nevertheless play in the learning of hard words. I’ll propose a framework for word-to-world mapping in which perception of the referent world itself offers us significant structure, and the syntactic structure we gather from the language is connected to these representations. This connection, and the structural representations on both sides of the word-to-world coin, allow us to see what we shouldn’t be able to see, and hear what we shouldn’t be able to hear. I’ll offer experimental evidence that our perception of the world includes rapid extraction of event structure, and hypothesize that this allows access to abstract relational meaning even in young children. These representations play an important role in understanding how situational contexts permit children to learn even the most abstract of terms, such as symmetrical predicates (e.g., the meaning of “equal”) and truth-functional negation (e.g., the meaning of “not”).

Interactive Robot Learning
2023-06-21 14:00 - 15:00 | FRUMAM, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Summary: In this talk, we focus on main methods and models enabling humans to teach embodied social agents such as social robots, using natural interaction. Humans guide the learning process of such agents by providing various teaching signals, which could take the form of feedback, demonstrations and instructions. This overview describes how human teaching strategies are incorporated within machine learning models. We detail the approaches by providing definitions, technical descriptions, examples and discussions on limitations. We also address natural human biases during teaching. We then present applications such as interactive task learning, robot behavior learning and socially assistive robotics. Finally, we discuss research opportunities and challenges of interactive robot learning.
Bio: Prof. Mohamed Chetouani is currently a Full Professor in signal processing and machine learning for human-machine interaction. He is affiliated to the PIRoS (Perception, Interaction et Robotique Sociales) research team at the Institute for Intelligent Systems and Robotics (CNRS UMR 7222), Sorbonne University (formerly Pierre and Marie Curie University). His activities cover social signal processing, social robotics and interactive machine learning with applications in psychiatry, psychology, social neuroscience and education. He was the coordinator of the ANIMATAS H2020 Marie Sklodowska Curie European Training Network (2018-2022). Since 2019, he is the President of the Sorbonne University Ethics Committee. He was involved in several educational activities including organization of summer schools. He is member of the EU Network of Human-Centered AI. He is General Chair of ACM ICMI 2023. He is in charge of the inclusion of Students with Disabilities for the Faculty of Science and Engineering of Sorbonne University.

Passerelles entre gestes et voix chez différentes espèces de primates (dont humain) : Approche comparative de la communication sensible à l’attention
2023-09-29 10:00 - 11:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Marie Bourjade
Laboratoire CLLE, Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès & Institut Universitaire de France

Bien avant l’entrée dans la parole, le jeune enfant mobilise déjà des compétences pragmatiques lui permettant de se faire comprendre, d’agir sur les adultes environnants et d’utiliser intentionnellement ses comportements à des fins communicationnelles. Parmi ces compétences pragmatiques, la Communication Sensible à l’Attention réfère à la capacité d’ajuster la modalité sensorielle des signaux communicatifs à l’attention de l’entourage. Elle revêt une importance particulière sur le plan de l’acquisition du langage, mais également de son évolution. En effet, le partage attentionnel entre parent et enfant pourrait avoir joué un rôle clé dans l’émergence de la communication sensible à l’attention chez les primates, constituant de facto une passerelle entre geste et voix. Je présenterai des travaux comparatifs réalisés en conditions écologiques chez le chimpanzé, le babouin olive et plusieurs groupes de population humaine, tous portant sur le choix des modalités de communication du jeune enfant envers sa mère selon l’état attentionnel de cette dernière. Les résultats mettront en avant les acquisitions du jeune en fonction de l’étayage maternel et souligneront l’importance fondamentale des interactions précoces dans les processus de socialisation et de développement communicationnel. Ces travaux seront remis en perspective avec les modèles culturels de parentalité et les hypothèses évolutives sur le conflit attentionnel parent-enfant.

The cerebellum in language and cognition
2023-10-17 12:30 - 13:30 | B011 LPL, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Anila D’Mello : l’Université de Texas

The cerebellum contains over 80% of the neurons in the brain, and over 50% of the neurons in the central nervous system. Despite being historically considered a motor structure, clinical and neuroimaging work find that the cerebellum is also important for cognition. This talk will present research integrating human neuroimaging, behavior, and neuromodulation to understand cerebellar contributions to higher-order language, social communication, and cognitive control in both neurotypical and autistic individuals.

Word learning in toddlerhood: The role of linguistic and social cues in naturalistic learning scenarios
2023-11-02 11:00 - 12:00 | LIS, 52 Av. Escadrille Normandie Niemen, Marseille, 13397, France
Monica Barbir, a researcher at the University of Tokyo

in a hybrid mode in LIS (Luminy) and online via Zoom at:
https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/85497246420?pwd=dkFnbTBybGI3ZWhnN0tVZlVXVWtvQT09

Phylogénies hérétiques de la bioluminescence : quels partenariats peut-on inventer avec les organismes lumineux ?
2024-02-23 11:00 - 12:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Jeremie Brugidou : Artiste-chercheur · PhD Art&Sciences – Recherche-Création · ENS / Paris 8 / Nanterre / Aix-Marseille – Romans / Films / Installations et performances
Phylogénies hérétiques de la bioluminescence : quels partenariats peut-on inventer avec les organismes lumineux ?
À travers une approche théorique, historique, expérimentale et science fictionnelle, je propose de réfléchir aux liens qui nous unissent à ces autres vivants qui produisent de la lumière.

Phylogénies hérétiques de la bioluminescence : quels partenariats peut-on inventer avec les organismes lumineux ?
2024-02-23 11:00 - 12:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
L’ILCB est heureux de recevoir vendredi 23 février Jérémie Brugidou pour un séminaire Art & Sciences intitulé :
“Phylogénies hérétiques de la bioluminescence : quels partenariats peut-on inventer avec les organismes lumineux ?”
À travers une approche théorique, historique, expérimentale et science fictionnelle, J. Brugidou propose de réfléchir aux liens qui nous unissent à ces autres vivants qui produisent de la lumière.
Jérémie Brugidou est résident à l’IMERA (https://www.imera.fr/chercheur/brugidou-jeremie/)
Voici un rapide portrait de cet artiste-chercheur : “cinéaste et docteur en Arts. Il est l’auteur de deux long-métrages documentaires, ainsi que de nombreux essais visuels. Il soutient à l’Université Paris 8 en 2020 sa thèse intitulée « Vers une écologie de l’apparition. Le mystère de la genèse des formes à partir d’une Annonciation bioluminescente chez James Cameron », co-dirigée par Christa Blümlinger et Dominique Lestel (ENS Paris). Il a obtenu une bourse postdoctorale (2020-21) dans le cadre d’un projet intitulé « L’Esthétique au présent : puissances de l’image mouvante », et financé par la Fondation Balzan. Le titre de son projet de recherche est “Biomedialuminescence : vers une écologie de l’apparition “. Il fonde son travail sur la recherche-création, tissant des relations fructueuses entre les arts et les sciences. Dans ce cadre il est l’auteur de plusieurs articles scientifiques en sciences humaines, en langue française et anglaise, de chapitres d’ouvrages, et a co-dirigé un numéro spécial de la revue Social Science Information (SSI) sur la thématique de l’océan.”
pour en savoir plus :

Site web : http://www.estca.univ-paris8.fr/index.php/jeremie-brugidou/
LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremiebrugidou

PS Dominique Lestel, son co-directeur de thèse, s’intéresse directement à la question du langage et de la frontière (ou pas) entre animal humain et non-humain, see https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominique_Lestel

11th Implicit Learning Seminar
2024-05-23 - 2024-05-25
The “Implicit Learning Seminar” is an international conference that draws together leading researchers who share an interest in the cognitive and neural bases of implicit learning.
The meeting is small (max. 100 participants) and features oral and poster presentations. There is no registration fee, but registration is mandatory.
Previous ILS : Sopot (2012), Bergen (2013), St. Petersburg (2014), Krakow (2015), Lancaster (2016), Budapest (2017), Cluj-Napoca (2018), Tromso (2019), Graz (2022), Bruxelles (2023).

The Rise and Fall of the Franconian Tone
2024-10-21 16:30 - 18:00 | B011 LPL, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Limburgish is spoken in the north-western 12% of the area in which the Franconian tone is spoken, where Cologne was the medieval centre of prestige. It was there, after the beginning of the construction of the cathedral in 1248, that a remarkable lexical tone contrast arose from the contact between the hundreds of highly qualified immigrant craftsmen and thousands of local workmen whose employment was related to the building enterprise. With hindsight, that tonogenesis can be seen as an experiment in pushing the conditions for L1 language acquisition to its limits: the tonogenesis occurred in declarative intonations, yet in principle the tone contrast needed to be available under all intonational conditions.
Unsurprisingly, the embedding of the tone contrast in the intonation grammar led to a wide variety of solutions, causing the dialects to vary in the number of intonation melodies (from 1 to 4) as well as in the pitch shapes of the tones. When focusing on individual dialects, a unique typological feature becomes apparent:
It is not possible to specify the pitch shapes of the tones: These vary with intonational conditions.
Importantly, despite the high pressure that must have been placed on infants to create grammars for what must be seen as implausibly varied set of phonetic forms, the grammars of the dialects known to date all conform to the model of Pierrehumbert (1980) and the assumptions of OT. The Limburgish data offer three confirmations of these models:

The star in T* is an instruction to associate with a *-marked TBU.
Edge-aligned tones align their (R/L) edge with the (R/L) edge of some other phonological constituent.
OT constraints are ranked.

With no basis in those models, other work added the stipulations for (a) that T* must always associate, for (b) that alignment implies association, and for (c) that some rankings are ungrammatical. The Limburgish data prove those stipulations wrong.
Today, the survival of the tone contrast may depend on the function of Acc2 as a local identity marker. In fact, this may be one route for tonoexodus. neutralizations would appear to occur through the generalization of Acc2. Another route lies in reducing the salience of the contrast: one case will be presented in which the tone contrast does exist, but is phonetically too subtle for outsiders to hear as anything than repetitions of the same unremarkable standard Dutch intonation contour. A third way out is through reinterpretation of the tone contrast in terms of consonants, vowels or vowel quantity. This will be illustrated on the basis of the Weert dialect.

Cracking the Code: Unveiling Hidden Patterns in Words, Speech, and Objects Through Implicit Statistical Learning
2025-01-13 11:00 - 12:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Professor Shelley Xiuli Tong, Director of Speech, Language and Reading Lab (https://slrlab.edu.hku.hk/) Faculty of Education – The University of Hong Kong
Abstract:
Humans possess remarkable abilities to learn new words, acquire language, and recognize objects based on sparse and ambiguous inputs. These abilities are rooted in the robust and efficient learning mechanism of statistical learning, which enables individuals to automatically detect regularities in their environment through exposure to multiple stimuli. Despite decades of research demonstrating the involvement of statistical learning in the formation of memory and internal models of prediction, the cognitive and neural mechanisms underpinning statistical learning remain unclear.
In this talk, I will share my team’s research on statistical learning over the past decade and discuss a series of behavioral and neurophysiological experiments designed to address newly emerging questions that uncover how statistical learning functions in the human brain across various encoding contexts. Specifically, I will address three fundamental questions: 1) Is statistical learning disrupted in individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders, especially dyslexia?; 2) How do different types of statistical learning change across ages and interact with other cognitive functions?; and 3) What cognitive and neural mechanisms support statistical learning?
In conclusion, I aim to demonstrate how new paradigms and theoretical frameworks are necessary to advance our understanding of how humans comprehend the probabilistic world, the mind, and the increasingly complex relationships between people and machines.

Computational passive bioacoustics: Will AI really solve animal communication?
2025-01-20 11:00 - 12:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Paul Best (Eq. Multisense & Body) has been awarded an 2024 ILCB post-doc grant to work on the topic of spatialised bioacoustics for the analysis of turn-taking in non-human interactions. Paul’s original background is in computer science and machine learning. During his PhD and post-doc in Toulon university, he worked on automating the analysis of non-human vocalisations using neural networks. Paul has applied these methods to a range of species with a variety of research questions, always working with long-term acoustic data recordings of free-ranging animals. Some of these projects include analysing the presence patterns of sperm whales, characterising the evolution of song structure in fin whales, and linking communicative complexity to sociality in orcas. Currently at CRPN, Paul is working with recordings of pilot whales and cao-vit gibbons, with a focus on how contextualising passive acoustic data with spatial information (the location of the vocalising animal) contributes to a better understanding of their vocal behaviour.
Abstract:
For this seminar, we will look at current research in passive bioacoustics, especially regarding opportunities and limitations of using machine learning to study non-human communication. With the increasing use of long-term monitoring systems such as autonomous acoustic recorders, the relatively young and growing field of computational passive bioacoustic is promising in collecting naturalistic data to contribute to ethological and evolutionary questions. Drawing on my research experience and project in this domain, I will present what is and could be possible with such approach, including with the use self-supervised learning, case studies of cetacean communication systems, the benefits of sound localisation and the relevance of integrating a musical perspective in the study of non-human communication.

Different bodies, different minds: Biology as a central driving force in the building of cognitive functions?
2025-01-27 11:00 - 12:00 | Amphi MASSIANI, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13331, France
Marie MONTANT
Abstract:
By focusing on language, I will try to show that cognitive architectures are built from goal-driven perceiving and acting bodies in their physical environment, a perceptive that holds for humans as well as other animals. To illustrate this theoretical position, firstly, I will show in humans that words conveying time information are tightly linked to body mouvements (Camille Grasso’s PhD thesis), that syntax is probably built on domain-general fine motor planification (Raphaël Py’s PhD thesis), that our lexica are grafted onto sensorimotor networks (Melissa Yavuz’s PhD thesis, Anna Poberezhnaia master’s thesis, Anne Kavounoudias collab.). Secondly, I will describe the approaches of Lise-Habib Dassetto (PhD) and Paul Best (Postdoc) that address the questions of how communicative systems appeared during evolution and what kind of method we can develop to conduct fair comparisons between humans and baboons (Lise H.D.) or pilot-whales (Paul B.).

Exploration interdisciplinaire des rêves et du cerveau.
2025-05-21 - 2025-05-22 | IMéRA
Peter SIMOR, neuropsychologue cognitif et directeur du Laboratoire du sommeil et de la cognition à l’Université Eötvös Loránd de Budapest, sera l’invité de la dernière séance du séminaire Inter-disciplines de l’IMERA les 21 et 22 mai prochains, sur le thème “Exploration interdisciplinaire des rêves et du cerveau.” https://www.imera.fr/agenda/peter-simor-exploration-interdisciplinaire-reves-cerveau/
L’accès est libre et ouvert à tous. Rappelons par ailleurs que les doctorants peuvent faire valoir leur présence à ces sessions au titre de la formation doctorale. Pour cela, ils doivent s’inscrire grâce au lien ci-dessous. Merci de les en avertir, et de leur suggérer de nous contacter, si vous pensez que cela pourrait les intéresser. https://adum.fr/script/formations.pl?mod=3678991&site=CDAMU
La rencontre se fera comme chaque fois en deux temps.

– MERCREDI 21 MAI, 14h-17h
Salle de réunion du premier étage de la Maison Neuve
IMERA Place Le Verrier 13004 MARSEILLE
Séminaire autour des travaux de Peter Simor, animé par Antoni Rodriguez Fornells, Professeur de neurosciences cognitives, Université de Barcelone (résident Iméra), Gabriella Crocco (Iméra), Olivier Morizot et Florence Boulc’h (IRES)
Cette séance vise à préparer collectivement la compréhension du discours qui sera développé le lendemain lors de la grande conférence. Elle se focalisera pour l’occasion sur l’analyse de l’article de Yuval Nir et Giulio Tononi : “Dreaming and the brain: from phenomenology to neurophysiology“. A travers cette lecture guidée, notre objectif sera de préparer le questionnement de Peter Simor sur la nature des rêves.
– JEUDI 22 MAI, 16h30-18h30
Salle de conférences, Maison des astronomes
IMERA Place Le Verrier 13004 MARSEILLE
Grande conférence de Peter Simor
Between the shores of sleep and wakefulness: from sleep-wake regulation to subjective experiences
Despite its apparently quiet nature and homogeneous nature, sleep is a markedly heterogeneous state with respect to biological functions, neurophysiological properties, information processing and mental experiences. The sleeping brain is constantly monitoring the balance between the internal homeostatic demands and the need to monitor the external environment in order to detect potential threats or relevant information. Far from passive, the sleeping brain continually negotiates between internal homeostatic needs and the imperative to remain attuned to the external world, in case of threats or salient stimuli. In doing so, it oscillates along a dynamic continuum between deeper, disconnected states and lighter phases marked by heightened information processing. Oneiric (dream) experiences seem to take part in this process and reflect the underlying cyclic patterns of sleep and wake regulation. Are dreams simply epiphenomena or inherent aspects of the sleeping brain? Do they reflect random neural activations or convey personally meaningful information? In this talk, I will explore these questions through the lens of contemporary dream science and cognitive neuroscience, integrating insights from interdisciplinary fields such as neuropsychoanalysis and consciousness research.

Bibliographie préparatoire
Yuval Nir and Giulio Tononi. Dreaming and the brain: from phenomenology to neurophysiology Trends in Cognitive Science 14(2), 2009. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2009.12.001
