ILCB

Alignment and prediction in conversational interactions by Prof. Martin Pickering
2017-11-10 12:00 - 15:00 (Europe/Paris) | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Alignment and prediction in conversational interactions by Prof. Martin Pickering (University of Edinburgh)

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.

Three decades of structural priming research: implications for syntactic representation, domain-specificity of syntax, and multilingualism by Robert Hartsuiker
2017-06-30 12:00 - 15:00 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Three decades of structural priming research: implications for syntactic representation, domain-specificity of syntax, and multilingualism
About thirty years ago, Kay Bock discovered structural priming, the tendency for speakers and listeners to recycle syntactic structures they have recently encountered. A recent meta-analysis of 70 published papers (Mahowald et al., 2017) shows that structural priming (as well as its enhancement by lexical overlap between prime and target sentence) is highly robust. Here, I look back at three decades of structural priming research, with a particular emphasis on the theoretical implications for syntactic representation, on the organization of the syntactic representations of multiples languages in multilinguals, and on the question of whether structural processing is domain-specific or is shared with other cognitive domains, such as music or math. I then look forward to an ongoing research line on the late acquisition of syntax in a second language. I will describe our account of this acquisition process, according to which syntactic representations start out as separate for each language but merge as the learner’s proficiency increases, and show the results of an artificial language learning study designed to test this account.

PLEASE REMEMBER:

-To plan for the lunch buffet, attendance must be confirmed by sending an email to lunchtalks@ilcb.fr

Please let us know if you have any dietary restrictions (vegetarian, allergies, etc.).

-Speaker suggestions (warmly encouraged) for September-June should be sent to lunchtalks@ilcb.fr

12.00-13.00 Talk (Salle de conférences, LPL) by Robert Hartsuiker (University of Ghent, Belgium)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 | 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.

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]

Statistical learning as an individual ability by Ram Frost
2015-12-11 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Statistical learning as an individual ability by Ram Frost (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem – Department of Psychology)
Most research in Statistical Learning (SL) has focused on mean success rate of participants in detecting statistical contingencies at a group level. In recent years, however, researchers show increased interest in individual abilities in SL. What determines individuals' efficacy in detecting regularities in SL? What does it predict? Is it stable across modalities? We explore these questions by trying to understand the source of variance in performance in a visual SL task through a novel methodology. The theoretical implications for a mechanistic explanation of SL will be discussed.

How do central processes cascade into peripheral processes in written language production ? by Sonia Kandel
2015-12-03 16:00 - 18:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
How do central processes cascade into peripheral processes in written language production ? by Sonia Kandel (LPNC & Gipsa-Lab Grenoble (Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS))
With the arrival of internet, tablets and smartphones many people spend more time writing than speaking (email, chat, SMS, etc.). Despite the importance of writing in our society, the studies investigating written language production are scarce. In addition, most studies investigated written production either from a central point of view (i.e., spelling processing) or a peripheral approach (i.e., motor production) without questioning their relation. We believe, instead, that central and peripheral processing cannot be investigated independently. There is a functional interaction between spelling and motor processing. Letter production does not merely depend on its shape –and its specifications for stroke order and direction– but also on the way we encode it orthographically. For example, the movements to produce letters PAR in the orthographically irregular word PARFUM (perfume) are different than in the regular word PARDON (pardon). Spelling processes cascade into motor production. The nature of the spelling processes that are activated before movement initiation will determine the way the cascade will operate during movement production. Lexical and sub-lexical processes do not spread into motor execution to the same extent.

Apes, Language and the Brain by Bill Hopkins
2015-10-23 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Apes, Language and the Brain by Bill Hopkins (Georgia State University)
For more than 150 years, philosophers and scientist have pondered the uniqueness of human language with a particular fascination with the linguistic, cognitive and neural capacities of great apes. A majority of the scientific work on this topic has come from so-called ""ape-language"" studies With the advent of modern imaging technologies, the question of human language uniqueness can now be addressed from a neurological perspective. In this presentation, I discuss the neurobiology of language from the standpoint of comparative studies on the evolution of Broca's and Werncicke's areas in primates, notably chimpanzees.

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart by Albert Costa
2015-06-26
If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart by Albert Costa
We are constantly making decisions of many different sorts. From more mundane decisions such as which clothes to wear every morning or where to go for lunch, to more relevant ones, such as whether we can afford the price of a nice holiday on a Pacific island, or whether an investment plan is too risky; decision making is an everyday life activity. It is well known that our decisions often depart from a purely rational cost benefit economical analysis, and that indeed they are biased by several factors that prompt intuitive responses that often drive the decision made. In this talk, I will describe several studies in which there is a pervasive effect of the language in which problems are presented on decision-making. These studies cover economic, moral and intellectual decisions. Together the evidence suggests that a reduction in the emotional resonance prompted by the problem leads to a reduction in the impact of intuitive processes on decision-making. This evidence not only helps to understand the forces driving decision-making, but it also has important implications for a world in which people are commonly faced with problems in a foreign language.

Gesture as a Window Onto Conceptualization. by Gale Stam
2015-06-19
Gesture as a Window Onto Conceptualization by Gale Stam (National Louis University)
According to McNeill (1992, 2005, 2012) gestures are as much a part of language as speech is. Together gesture and speech develop from a 'growth point' that has both imagistic and verbal aspects. This model for verbal thought is ""a 'language-imagery' or language-gesture dialectic"" in which thought, language, and gesture develop over time and influence each other (McNeill, 2005 p.25).
Research on both the perception of speech and gesture (Kelly, Kravitz & Hopkins, 2004) and the production of speech and gesture (Marstaller & Burianová, 2014) have shown that the same areas of the brain are involved in both. In addition, empirical research (e.g., Chase & Wittman, 2013; Goldin-Meadow, Wein, and Chang, 1992; Goldin-Meadow & Alibali, 1995; Iverson & Goldin-Meadow, 2005; McNeill & Duncan, 2000; Özçalışkan & Goldin-Meadow, 2005, 2009; Stam, 1998, 2006, 2008, 2010b, 2014) on co-speech gestures indicates that gestures provide information about speakers' thinking and conceptualizations that speech alone does not. Research on the light gestures can shed on the second language acquisition process and second language teaching has been growing (for reviews, see Stam 2013; Stam & McCafferty 2008). One area in particular where gestures have been shown to provide an enhanced window onto the mind is that of motion events and thinking for speaking (Stam 2007). This talk will discuss how gestures allow us to see speakers' conceptualizations in first language and second language thinking for speaking. It will present evidence from several studies (Stam, 2010a, 2015 ;

Reverse engineering early language learning by Emmanuel Dupoux
2015-05-13
Reverse engineering early language learning by Emmanuel Dupoux by (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique)
Decades of research on early language acquisition have documented how infants quickly and robustly acquire their native tongue(s) across large variations in their input and environment. The mechanisms that enable such a feat remain, however, poorly understood. The proposition, here, is to supplement experimental investigations by a quantitative approach based on tools from machine learning and language technologies, applied to corpora of infant directed input. I illustrate the power of this approach through a reanalysis of some previous claims made regarding the nature and function of Infant Directed as opposed to Adult Directed Speech (IDS vs ADS). I also revisit current ideas about the learning of phoneme categories, a problem that has been long thought to involve only bottom-up statistical learning. In contrast, I show that a bottom up strategy does not scale up to real speech input, and that phoneme learning requires not only the joint learning of phoneme and word forms but also of prosodic and semantic representations. I discuss a global learning architecture where provisional linguistic representations are gradually learned in parallel, and present some predictions for language learning in infants.

Do inhibit or not to inhibit during bilingual language control by Mathieu Declerck
2015-02-06 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Do inhibit or not to inhibit during bilingual language control by Mathieu Declerck (BLRI, AMU)
One of the mayor topics in the language control literature specifically, and the bilingual literature in general is inhibition, which entails the reduction of non-target language activation and thus interference resolution. In this talk I would discuss the existing evidence for inhibitory control processes at work during language switching, a commonly used task to investigate the underlying mechanism of language control. More specifically, asymmetrical switch costs, n-2 language repetition costs, and reversed language proficiency in mixed language blocks will be discussed in relation to inhibition. Finally, since several models assume little to no implementation of inhibition with highly proficient bilinguals, the role of language proficiency will also be considered.

Do visual and attentional factors predict reading skills? by Veronica Montani
2015-01-30 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Do visual and attentional factors predict reading skills? by Veronica Montani (BLRI, AMU)
Visual-attentional abilities have a prominent role in reading. Reading rate is constrained by the number of letters acquired at each fixation, i.e. the visual span, that in turn seems to be mainly determined by the effect of crowding. On the other hand, spatial attention is critically involved in reading process, in particular for the phonological decoding of unfamiliar strings. I will briefly review studies that investigated the role of low-level processing factors in reading and their possible implication in reading disorders. Furthermore, I will present new data that show the distinct contribution of different visual-attentional factors on various reading measures, such as text reading, word naming and eye movements.

Probabilistic Graphical Models of Dyslexia by Yaïr LAKRETZ
2014-11-28 11:00 - 13:00 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Probabilistic Graphical Models of Dyslexia by Yaïr LAKRETZ (‘Sagol’ school of neuroscience, Tel-Aviv University)
Reading is a complex cognitive faculty, errors in which assume diverse forms. To capture the complex structure of reading errors, we propose a novel way of analyzing these errors using probabilistic graphical models. Our study focuses on three inquiries. (a) We examine which graphical model best captures the hidden structure of reading errors. (b) We draw on the results of (a) to resolve a theoretical debate on whether dyslexia is a monolithic or heterogeneous disorder. (c) We examine whether a graphical model can diagnose dyslexia closely to how experts do. We explore three different models: an LDA-based model and two Naïve Bayes models which differ by their assumptions about the generation process of reading errors. The models are trained on a large corpus of reading errors. Our results show that the LDA-based model best captures patterns of reading errors and may therefore contribute to the understanding of dyslexia and to the diagnostic procedure. We also demonstrate that patterns of reading errors are best described by a model assuming multiple dyslexia subtypes, therefore supporting the heterogeneous approach to dyslexia. Finally, a Naïve Bayes model, which shares assumptions with diagnostic practice, best replicates labels given by clinicians and can be therefore used for automation of the diagnosis process.

The influence of expertise on perception, cognition, and brain connectivity by Stefan Elmer
2014-09-19 11:00 - 13:00 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
The influence of expertise on perception, cognition, and brain connectivity by Stefan Elmer (Universität Zürich)
A better understanding of the perceptual and cognitive neural underpinnings underlying exceptional behavioural skills has important educational, societal, as well as clinical implications (i.e., for example in the context of developmental dyslexia, aphasia, and foreign language learning). Here, I will present recent data collected from professional musicians with and without absolute pitch, as well as from simultaneous language interpreters, to reveal how expertise and training has an influence on the functional-structural malleability of perceptual and cognitive subdivisions of the human brain. In the same context, I will also provide some evidence for transfer effects from musicianship to specific aspects of speech processing. Finally, since currently there is no doubt that perceptual and cognitive functions do not work in isolation but are embedded in neuronal assemblies consisting of networks influencing each other's in a reciprocal manner, I will propose some novel methodological approaches for evaluating functional and structural connectivity within small-scale perceptual-cognitive networks in musicians with and without absolute pitch.

Towards an Online Rhyming Dictionary for Mexican Spanish by Alfonso Medina
2014-07-18 14:00 - 17:00 | LIA, chemin des Meinajariès, Avignon, 84911, France
Towards an Online Rhyming Dictionary for Mexican Spanish by Alfonso Medina
Rhyming dictionaries are a kind of reverse dictionaries. They group words according to rhyming patterns. Rhymes can share exact sequences of vowel and consonant sounds towards the end of a word (consonant rhyme) or just similar vowel sounds (assonant rhyme). Thus, these dictionaries are based on pronunciation, not on writing patterns. Also, since consonance and assonance depend on the stressed syllable, words which end with a stressed syllable are grouped together, those whose stressed syllable is the next to last appear together, and so on.

In addition, word pronunciation may vary with time and across geographical and social dialects. In Spanish, this is particularly clear when word loans (for instance, Anglicisms and Galicisms) are considered. In fact, they tend to keep their original writing, at least in the Mexican variant which is the most spoken one. For example, the following loan words, common in Mexican Spanish, rhyme: flash, collage, garage, cottage, squash. Their last syllable is stressed and they are ordered in reverse according to their sounds and not their letters: (respectively, /fláʃ/, /ko.láʃ/, /ga.ráʃ/, /ko.táʃ/ and /es.kwáʃ/).

The project described takes the current nomenclature of the Diccionario del español de México (http://dem.colmex.mx/) to generate automatically a rhyming dictionary. Also, since the results of an online query to such a dictionary can be quite large, a procedure was developed to rank them semantically. The idea is to measure the similarities of the query definition to each of the definitions of the rhyming words. These words are then ordered from highest to lowest similarity to the query.

The bilingual brain: Plasticity and processing from cradle to grave by Manuel Carreira
2014-07-04 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
The bilingual brain: Plasticity and processing from cradle to grave by Manuel Carreira (Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain IKERBASQUE. Basque Foundation for Science. Bilbao. Spain)
Most people either learn more than one language from birth or invest quite a lot of time and effort learning a second language. Bilingualism and second language learning is an interesting case for investigating cognitive and brain plasticity. In this talk I will describe behavioral and neuroimaging evidence on the cognitive and brain mechanisms adults and infants (monlinguals, bilinguals and second language learners) use for processing language. In particular I will address whether proficient second language learners use similar or different brain mechanisms during processing and what are the neural consequences (structural and functional) of dealing with two languages.

How do central processes cascade into peripheral processes in written language production? by Sonia Kandel
2014-06-20 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
How do central processes cascade into peripheral processes in written language production? by Sonia Kandel (Univ. Grenoble Alpes, LPNC (CNRS UMR 5105) – Grenoble, France And Univ. Grenoble Alpes, GIPSA-LAB (CNRS UMR 5216), Dept. Parole & Cognition –Grenoble, France)
With the arrival of internet, tablets and smartphones many people spend more time writing than speaking (email, chat, SMS, etc.). Despite the importance of writing in our society, the studies investigating written language production are scarce. In addition, most studies investigated written production either from a central point of view (i.e., spelling processing) or a peripheral approach (i.e., motor production) without questioning their relation. We believe, instead, that central and peripheral processing cannot be investigated independently. There is a functional interaction between spelling and motor processing. Letter production does not merely depend on its shape –and its specifications for stroke order and direction– but also on the way we encode it orthographically. For example, the movements to produce letters PAR in the orthographically irregular word PARFUM (perfume) are different than in the regular word PARDON (pardon). Spelling processes cascade into motor production. The nature of the spelling processes that are activated before movement initiation will determine the way the cascade will operate during movement production. Lexical and sub-lexical processes do not spread into motor execution to the same extent.

Fan Cao, Chotiga Pattamadilok, Johannes Ziegler
2014-06-05
Fan Cao (1), Chotiga Pattamadilok (2), Johannes Ziegler (3)
((1)Michigan State University), (2) LPL UMR7309 CNRS AMU, (3) LPC UMR7290 CNRS AMU)
Salle de conférences B011, bât. B 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence
9h30-12h30 Salle de conférences B011, bât. B 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence

Cross-linguistic and neurolinguistic perspectives on reading and speech processing

Neural specialization and reading ability
Fan Cao (Michigan State University)

The brain becomes specialized with exposure to the environment. One piece of evidence comes from how the language system shapes brain function. In a cross-linguistic developmental study, we show growing divergence between Chinese reading and English reading from children to adults. We found that specialization is positively correlated with proficiency. For example, there is reduced specialization in children with reading disability. Another example is proficiency effect in bilinguals, where we found greater specialization with higher proficiency in a group of late Chinese-English bilinguals. We also found that specialization can be facilitated by providing more effective instruction. In a series of training studies, we compared writing and visual-only learning in English learners of Chinese, and we found writing training evoked a more native-like brain network, suggesting greater specialization and accommodation. In summary, the brain becomes specialized with language experience and optimal instruction will promote the process of specialization.

How does learning to read modify speech processing ? Chotiga Pattamadilok (Laboratoire Parole et Langage)

Behavioral and brain imaging studies have demonstrated that learning to read and write changes the way the brain processes spoken language. However, the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying such modification are still under debate. Two complementary hypotheses have been proposed. According to the ""online"" account, strong connections between spoken and written language result in the automatic co-activation of both codes when one processes language, such that hearing a spoken word activates, in real time, its corresponding written form and vice-versa. According to the ""offline or developmental account"" learning to read induces more profound changes withinthe spoken language system itself, probably by restructuring the nature of the phonological representations. Evidence supporting both hypotheses will be discussed.

A cross-language perspective on reading, reading development and dyslexia Johannes Ziegler (Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive)

Many theories assume that different languages or writing systems afford different reading styles. One idea that has been around since the early 70s is that opaque writing systems favor a ""Chinese"" style of reading (a direct route to meaning) whereas transparent writing systems favor a ""Phoenician"" style (an indirect route that is phonologically mediated). However, research on reading development and dyslexia across languages draws a different picture, one in which the core reading processes are very similar across languages. The main differences are related to consistency and orthographic complexity – these variables affect the granularity of the computations rather than the computations themselves.
