ILCB

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 (Europe/Paris) | 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)

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

Workshop on Bayesian models of cognition, language and speech
2021-07-09 09:45 - 18:00 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
In recent years, Bayesian approaches have developed at a remarkable rate in a large variety of domains, from cognitive science to machine learning, as well as speech and language sciences and neuroscience. They offer us new ways of modelling human as well as animal cognition in situations of uncertainty and in a probabilistic framework. In the field of the cognitive bases of language and speech, innovative Bayesian models have been proposed by Moulin-Frier, Diard, Schwartz & Bessière (2015) or Carr, Smith, Culbertson & Kirby (2020), among others. In July 2020, the ILCB held an online seminar on Bayesian modelling with Julien Diard and Jean-Luc Schwartz. This year’s workshop will feature presentations by Julien Diard and Jon Carr, and by PhD students Mamady Nabé, Lena Huttner and Elliot Huggett.
Program

Doc/Post Doc Day : Interdisciplinary Burst
2021-07-07 10:00 - 17:00 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
The workshop will be held at the Laboratoire Parole et Langage in Aix-en-Provence (live!).
There will also be the possibility to attend the event online at :
https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/99695801333?pwd=[REDACTED]

Registration is mandatory by the 25th of June at the link below.
Please specify next to your name if you want to attend the event online (for instance: Joseph (online)). That will allow us to get organized for lunch on site.
https://www.ilcb.fr/event/journee-des-doctorants-et-post-doctorants-2021/

The full programme below and at Journée des doctorants et post-doctorants 2021 | ILCB!
Looking forward to discussing with you!
ILCB Docs and PostDocs

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.

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).

Treize Minutes
2021-06-15 20:00 - 23:30 | Espace Julien, 39 Cours Julien, Marseille, 13006, France
Petites conférences pluridisciplinaires rythmées : 6 intervenants, 13′ par orateur !
Une salle comble, des vidéos vues par des milliers d’internautes : les Treize Minutes Marseille sont de retour à l’Espace Julien pour une huitième édition de ce « butinage » intellectuel qui a fait le succès des conférences TED. Des sujets variés abordés par des intervenants d’horizons divers allant des sciences humaines et sociales aux sciences expérimentales…
Six nouveaux orateurs viendront nous faire rêver et réfléchir. Des virus masqués ? Des virus qui soignent ? Des histoires d’A ? Brousse Willis qui plante l’humanité ? Et la glottophobie ? Qu’esseu queu ça veut direu ? Prenez une comète dans la face avec Mireille Ansaldi, Adeline Duperray, Etienne Decroly, Fabrice Feinstein, Médéric Gasquet-Cyrus et Thierry Tatoni.
Entrée libre, réservation conseillée. Traduction en Langue des Signes Française sur place et en streaming. Programme, information, réservation à partir du 2 juin et streaming en direct sur : https://treize.lis-lab.fr/ .

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]

From prelinguistic communication to word use in typically hearing and deaf infants
2021-05-21 12:00 - 13:00
Danielle Matthews (Department of psychology, The University of Sheffield)

Around the end of the first year infants make the transition from prelinguistic communication (babble, gesture, eye contact) to word use. I will present a series of studies that have 1) measured individual differences that predict this transition 2) tested experimentally if it is possible to promote learning and 3) compared deaf and hearing infants. Together these studies reveal the important role of the social environment in learning to talk.

You can import this shared google calendar to your own calendar for details about our next meetings and speakers.
The zoom link:

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

Échanges autour de méthodes d'analyse de données conversationnelles
2021-05-11 14:00 - 17:30
Échanges autour de méthodes d’analyse de données conversationnelles
14h Abdellah Fourtassi: Using NLP as a research method to study (multimodal) interactive dynamics in early child-caregiver dialogue
15h Uwe Reichel : Prosody parameterization applied to language typology (plus hands-on ***)
16h Leonardo Lancia: Analyses of speech coordinative patterns
17h General discussion
*** The hands-on material can be downloaded here:
https://www.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/~reichelu/transfer/copasul_handson.zip
It contains a pdf which in section 3 guides through how to install the needed packages and to set up the Jupyter Notebook (tested on linux).

Participer à la réunion Zoom
https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/7589644650?pwd=[REDACTED]
ID de réunion : 758 964 4650
Code secret : tFF5ge
Next M-Converse meeting will take place early in the summer featuring: Roxane Bertrand, Magalie Ochs and Benoit Favre. Stay tuned !
You want to give a talk? Please, do get in touch with a member of the organizing team.
Céline, Daniele, Leonardo and Noël

The Socio-Computational Architecture of Language Acquisition Framework: Linking Social Language Acquisition with Artificial Intelligence.
2021-05-07 12:00 - 13:00
Sho Tsuji (International Research Center for Neurointelligence, Univ. of Tokyo)
Theories and data on language acquisition suggest a range of cues are used, ranging from information on structure found in the linguistic signal itself, to information gleaned from the environmental context or through social interaction. We propose a blueprint for computational models of the early language learner (SCALa, for Socio-Computational Architecture of Language Acquisition) that makes explicit the connection between the kinds of information available to the social learner and the computational mechanisms required to extract language-relevant information and learn from it. SCALa integrates a range of views on language acquisition, further allowing us to make precise recommendations for future large-scale empirical research.
The zoom link:
https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/2515421853?pwd=[REDACTED]

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 :

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.

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]

____

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,

Restitution projet étudiant.e.s MASCO 29 janvier
2021-01-29 13:00 - 16:00
L’équipe de l’UE ingénierie cognitive :
L’UE ingénierie cognitive du Masco a changé de forme. Depuis la deuxième semaine de janvier, les étudiant.e.s et l’équipe du CREx travaillent sur un projet collaboratif impliquant l’analyse des tâches et l’organisation du développement d’un système. Les étudiants devront mettre en œuvre leurs connaissances sur des sujets proposés comme par exemple :
– la mesure du rythme cérébral et extractions des fréquences référencées (alpha, beta,…)
– le degrés de synchronie entre deux « inter actants » en mesurant extrayant des signaux physio (ECG, EEG)
– Une approche Art et NeuroPhysio, mesurer l’effet du rythme (stimulation visuelle ou auditive) sur les signaux physio ou au contraire « sonifier » ou visualiser les variations des signaux cérébraux et physio
– Mind control d’un mobile
– La BCI

Le 29 janvier 2021 nous organisons la restitution du travail (examen) des étudiants à la salle des voûtes (Saint Charles) de 13 h 30 à 16 h (programme : : https://filez.univ-amu.fr/q16ooumqhq). Le lien vers la retransmission de cet évènement est à la fin du mail.
Pour débuter cette séance de restitution, nous aurons le plaisir d’accueillir, en visio, Camille Jeunet qui présentera une partie de ses travaux sur l’imagerie Mentale ainsi que sur l’utilisation de la BCI (Brain Control Imagerie) associée à la réalité virtuelle. Cette présentation sera suivie de la restitution par les M2 MASCO de leur projet développé pendant l’UE Ingénieur Cogniticien. Ces projets autour de casques EEG OpenBCI ont été développés par groupe de 4 à 6 étudiant-e-s.
Participer à la réunion Zoom
https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/93929390495?pwd=[REDACTED]
ID de réunion : 939 2939 0495
Code secret : [REDACTED]

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.

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.

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

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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Journée ILCB (CANCELLED)
2020-05-19 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France

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

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

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

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

Journée Annuelle des Doctorants 2019
2019-12-13 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
ProgrammeJAD2019

Rencontre recherches sur le jeune enfant
2019-12-11 13:00 - 17:00 | Maison de la recherche, 29 Avenue Robert Schuman,, Aix en Provence, 13100, France
Programme :
13h Visite du BabyLab de la Maison de la Recherche (Fabrice Cauchard)
13h45 Lola Rivoal et Maud Champagne Lavau (LPL) Isabelle Dautriche (LPC) 15h Pause Café
15h30 Abdellah Fourtassi (LIS) Clément François (LPL) Marianne Jover (Centre PsyCLE)
Lieu : Maison de la recherche, 29 avenue Schuman, salle 2.44
Date : 11 décembre, 13h-17h
Contact : marianne.jover@univ-amu.fr

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

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

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

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

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