Word learning in honor of Lila Gleitman: Perception of structure from language and world
2023-06-09 09:00 - 11:00 (Europe/Paris) | 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.

Rob Hartsuiker
2023-07-10 11:00 - 12:00 | B011 LPL, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Titre à préciser

(Mis) alignment in alignment research :
2023-07-13 08:00 - 17:00

COBRA
2023-07-13 08:00 - 17:00

École d'été
2023-08-28 08:00 - 2023-09-01 17:00 | CIRM – Luminy, 163 avenuede Luminy, Case 916, Marseille, 13288, France
École d’été

Journée ILCB
2023-09-22 | B011 LPL, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
CLAIRE KABDEBON
Title: The origins of human cognition: insights from the infant brain
Abstract: Our human-unique cognitive abilities to process speech, compose music or write fictions do not suddenly emerge in adulthood, but are rather deeply rooted in early development. A major discovery of the past decades is that infants come into the world equipped with a set of initial competencies coupled with powerful learning mechanisms that pave the way for later high-level cognitive achievements. However, the exact nature of this initial knowledge and learning algorithms remains largely unknown. In this talk, I will present some of my work that aims at leveraging the development of non-invasive neuroimaging techniques and signal processing tools to reveal these early abilities: from early auditory processing to the beginnings of language acquisition.

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.

(Mis)alignment in alignment research
2023-10-19 - 2023-10-20 | B011 LPL, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
https://www.cobra-network.eu/misalignment-workshop/

14th annual scientific day of the MRI-INT Center
2023-10-20
The MRI-INT Center in Marseille is organising its 14th annual scientific day on Friday, October 20 at Cerimed, on the medical school campus of La Timone, Marseille.
This year’s theme is ‘Neuroimaging beyond the cortex’ and will be an awesome opportunity to discover various aspects of imaging the cerebellum, the basal ganglia, and the spinal cord. It will feature talks by international, national, and local experts in the field.
It will also be an opportunity for local postdocs and students to present their MRI neuroimaging work in a poster session, whatever the brain region of interest.
You can access the program here : https://irmf.int.univ-amu.fr/en/annual-meetings/
Registration if free but mandatory : https://14th-day-mri-int.sciencesconf.org/
If you are interested, please register as soon as possible : the number of places is limited.
We are looking forward to you participation to this event !
The organizers : Elin Runnqvist, Olivier Coulon, Jean-Luc Anton, Marie-Hélène Grosbras

Annulé
2023-10-27 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Prediction in Language Processing: Some Ideas About How It’s Done
Tamara Swaab, Ph.D.
Editor-in-Chief: Cognition
Professor, Department of Psychology and
Center for Mind and Brain
University of California, Davis
Title of Talk: Prediction in Language Processing: Some Ideas About How It’s Done.
Rooted in century old ideas of Kant, recent theories of perception, cognition, language, and neuroscience propose that active generation of top-down predictions of imminent sensory input guide our perceptual experiences. These predictions can be based on long-term knowledge representations stored in memory, experience based probabilistic constraints and immediate contextual constraints. Several prominent contemporary approaches to language interpretation assign significant impact to predictive processing during language interpretation. According to these accounts, comprehenders engage in a set of processes by which they can predict and pre-activate imminent bits of the linguistic input. Some models suggest that predictive processing during language comprehension happens reflexively and under all circumstances. I will present the results of a series of studies from our lab that suggest that comprehenders do not automatically and uniformly predict, but instead flexibly adapt predictive processing depending on its utility in a given processing environment.

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=[REDACTED]

Journée de séminaire à l’occasion de la soutenance HDR de Cristel Portes
2023-12-01 10:00 - 19:00 | B011 LPL, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Programme
10h Brechtje Post (University of Cambridge, England)
10h Elisabeth Delais-Roussarie (Université de Nantes & LLING)
11h Coffee break
11h30 Stefan Baumann (University of Cologne, Germany)
12h15 Lunch ILCB
14h Soutenance HDR, Cristel Portes (Aix-Marseille University & CNRS/LPL)

Présentation de Elisabeth Delais-Roussarie (Université de Nantes & LLING)

Title: Faisceau d’indices phonétiques fins et interprétation : le cas des questions non-canoniques
Abstract: En m’appuyant sur les résultats de différentes études menées dans le but de caractériser la prosodie associée à des formes particulières de questions (questions alternatives (Delais-Roussarie & Turco 2019), questions rhétoriques (Beyssade & Delais-Roussarie 2022), questions non-canoniques de surprise (Celle & Pélissier 2022)), je tenterai de montrer que l’interprétation d’un énoncé, notamment d’une question non-canonique, est le résultat d’une convergence d’indices de nature diverse (grammaticaux, mais aussi phonétiques, gestuels, situationnels). Au plan simplement prosodique, des détails phonétiques fins tels que le débit, le registre, les trajectoires des mouvements mélodiques ou la qualité vocale interviennent sans doute davantage que la forme et la distribution des contours intonatifs nucléaires.

Présentation de Stefan Baumann (Université de Cologne, Allemagne)
Title: Head movements and pitch accents as cues to information status in (L1 and L2) French
Abstract: Languages differ in the way prosodic prominence is implemented to mark information status or focus (e.g. Kügler & Calhoun, 2020). At a parallel level of description, gestures have been found to occur more frequently with new and inferable referents than with given ones (e.g. Debreslioska & Gullberg 2020). For foreign languages, previous research has shown that deaccenting given information may be challenging for speakers of languages which use this strategy less (e.g. Rasier & Hiligsmann 2007). As for gestures, there is evidence that learners tend to over-explicitly mark referring expressions such as pronouns (Yoshioka 2008). To our knowledge, an analysis of information status expressed through both prosodic and gestural prominence (here: head movements) in L2 speech has not been carried out so far. In the present study, 25 Catalan learners of French were video recorded giving a short description of their best friend in French. The recordings were annotated in terms of information status (RefLex Scheme, Riester & Baumann 2017), pitch accents (F_ToBI, Delais- Roussarie et al. 2015), perceived prominence (DIMA, Kügler et al. 2022) and head movement types and apexes (M3D, Rohrer et al. 2020). Results show that Catalan learners of French marked new and inferable information more than given information either with pitch accents alone or with a combination of pitch accents and gestures. Given information was generally marked as less prominent than new(er) information (more initial accents, fewer rises, lower level of perceived prominence, fewer head movements) but still received a large proportion of pitch accents. However, no difference between the types of accent and only slight differences between the types of head movement were found in non-given categories. The results of an analysis of the same task by 7 French native speakers are compared with the learners’ results. L1 French speakers mark the extreme values of information status (i.e. given and new) in a more pronounced way using more fine-grained differences in pitch accent type.
References: Debreslioska, S., & Gullberg, M. (2020). What’s New? Gestures accompany inferable rather than brand-new referents in discourse. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 1935.
Delais-Roussarie et al. (2015) Intonational Phonology of French: Developing a ToBI system for French In S. Frota & P. Prieto (Eds.), Intonation in Romance. OUP.
Kügler, F., Baumann, S. & Röhr, C.T. (2022). Deutsche Intonation, Modellierung und Annotation (DIMA) – Richtlinien zur prosodischen Annotation des Deutschen. In: Schwarze, C. & Grawunder, S. (Eds.),
Transkription und Annotation gesprochener Sprache und multimodaler Interaktion (pp. 23–54). Narr. Kügler, F. & Calhoun, S. (2020). Prosodic encoding of information structure: A typological perspective. The Oxford Handbook of Language Prosody (pp. 454–467). Oxford Academic.
Rasier, L. & Hiligsmann, P. (2007). Prosodic transfer from L1 to L2. Theoretical and methodological issues. Nouveaux cahiers de linguistique française, 28, 41–66.
Riester, A. & Baumann S. (2017). The RefLex Scheme – Annotation Guidelines. SinSpeC. Working Papers of the SFB 732, vol. 14. University of Stuttgart.
Rohrer, P., Vilà-Giménez, I, Florit-Pons, J., Esteve-Gibert, N., Ren, A., Shattuck-Hufnagel, S., Prieto, P. (2020).
The MultiModal MultiDimensional (M3D) labeling system. Yoshioka, K. (2008). Gesture and information structure in first and second language. Gesture, 8, 236–255.
Présentation HDR Cristel Portes
Titre : De la prosodie du discours au sens de l’intonation en dialogue(s)
Résumé : Même s’il est aujourd’hui moins controversé que cela ne le fut que l’intonation fait partie de la grammaire des langues, définir quelles sont les primitives de l’analyse intonative et comment elles contribuent au sens d’un énoncé reste un défi et un enjeu majeur. Mes recherches défendent l’idée de la ‘normalité linguistique’ de l’intonation et du sens de l’intonation en essayant d’en identifier la spécificité. Je défends l’idée d’une ‘double articulation’ des configurations intonatives en unités porteuses de sens (les accents mélodiques et les tons de frontière), elles-mêmes décomposables en unités sans signification (les tons). Je défends la thèse que le sens de l’intonation reflète la dimension intimement dialogique et interactionnelle du langage à plusieurs égards : 1) il indique quelles parties de l’énoncé font référence aux connaissances partagées par les interlocuteurs versus à l’enjeu spécifique de l’énoncé ; 2) il indique comment le locuteur assume et/ou attribue à l’interlocuteur les connaissances ou les croyances mises en jeu par la situation évoquée par l’énoncé ; 3) il suggère les attentes du locuteur concernant la forme que l’énoncé suivant devrait avoir, sa source et ses relations potentielles avec l’énoncé en cours.
Title: From the prosody of discourse to intonational meaning in dialogue(s)
Abstract: Even if it is less controversial today than it used to be that intonation is part of the grammar of languages, it is still a challenge and a major issue to define what the primitives of intonational analysis are and how they contribute to the meaning of the utterance. My research defends the idea of the ‘linguistic normality’ of intonation and intonational meaning by attempting to identify its specificity. I defend the ‘double articulation’ of intonational patterns into meaning-carrying units (pitch accents and boundary tones), which can themselves be broken down into meaningless units (tones). I argue that the meaning of intonation reflects the intimately dialogical and interactional dimension of language in several respects: 1) it indicates which parts of the utterance refer to the knowledge shared by the interlocutors versus to the specific issue at stake in the utterance; 2) it indicates how the speaker assumes and/or attributes to the addressee the knowledge and beliefs brought into play by the situation evoked by the utterance; 3) it suggests speakers’ expectations about the form that the following utterance should take, its source and its potential relations with the utterance in progress.
Jury/committee: Stefan Baumann, Claire Beyssade, Elisabeth Delais-Roussarie, Mariapaola D’Imperio, Martine Grice, Brechtje Post, Michael Wagner.

Aesthetic Experience across disciplines
2024-01-22 | Le CAMPUS SAINT CHARLES, place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13003
The students from the Master in Cognitive sciences invite you to an interdisciplinary workshop on Aesthetic Experience across disciplines
Beauty, as a reflection of our perception, unfolds in as many different ways as there are people to contemplate it. This leads us to wonder: what is the basis of individual and collective aesthetic experience. In an effort to explore its complexity, we embark on an intellectual journey where experts will share their vision of the aesthetic experiences according to their discipline, from philosophy to neuroscience.

A Large-Scale Analysis of Human Question-Asking Strategies in a Referential Visual Search Task
2024-02-01 13:00 - 14:00
Alberto Testoni, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation – University of Amsterdam.
Abstract:
In recent years, a multitude of datasets of human–human conversations has been released for the main purpose of training conversational agents based on data-hungry artificial neural networks. Datasets of this sort represent a useful and underexplored source to validate, complement, and enhance cognitive studies on human behavior and language use. We present a method that leverages the recent development of powerful computational models to obtain the fine-grained annotation required to apply metrics and techniques from Cognitive Science to large datasets. Previous work in Cognitive Science has investigated the question-asking strategies of human participants by employing different variants of the so-called 20-question-game setting and proposing several evaluation methods. In my talk, I focus on GuessWhat, a task proposed within the Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing communities that is similar in structure to the 20-question-game setting. Crucially, the GuessWhat dataset contains tens of thousands of dialogues based on real-world images, making it a suitable setting to investigate the question-asking strategies of human players on a large scale and in a natural setting. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of computational tools to automatically code how the hypothesis space changes throughout the dialogue in complex visual scenes. On the one hand, we confirm findings from previous work on smaller and more controlled settings. On the other hand, our analyses allow us to highlight the presence of “uninformative” questions (in terms of Expected Information Gain) at specific rounds of the dialogue. We hypothesize that these questions fulfill pragmatic constraints that human players exploit to solve visual tasks in complex scenes successfully. Our work illustrates a method that brings together efforts and findings from different disciplines to gain a better understanding of human question-asking strategies on large-scale datasets, while at the same time posing new questions about the development of conversational systems.
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Cognitive Engineering module of the ILCB's Masters of Cognitive Science (MasCo)
2024-02-02

Understanding Understanding -- in General, and in Large Language Models
2024-02-09 12:00 - 13:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
David Schlangen : Professor, “Foundations of Computational Linguistics”, University of Potsdam
Abstract:
In the first part of the talk I will present an overview of the activities of my group (Foundations of CompLing at Uni Potsdam), organised around the quest to understand how linguistic communication can yield shared understanding. I will present an analytical framework in which similarities and differences in method and approach between text NLU (natural language understanding) and SLU (situated language understanding) can be described.
In the second part, and motivated by this framework, I will present a new computational framework for the evaluation of “chat-optimized LLMs” (cLLMs) like ChatGPT for their capabilities in task-oriented interaction.

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

Leveraging the auditory oscillatory function to treat speech and language disorders.
2024-03-15 12:00 - 14:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Anne-Lise Giraud
Abstract:
The neural computations that make oral communication possible must operate on multiple time scales, both in parallel and recursively. Neuronal oscillations at different scales and their precise coordination are a key instrument of this necessary multiplexing, a phenomenon we are exploring in humans through surface and intracortical EEG. In this presentation, I will recall the key computational principles and show how we can exploit them to address fundamental questions about neurodevelopmental pathologies and propose therapeutic solutions.
Link Zoom : https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/82661920965?pwd=[REDACTED]

ILCB’S KALEIDOSCOPE A Collective Journey through Multidisciplinary Insights
2024-03-29 | Espace Pouillon, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13003

Beyond typology: experimental explorations of language universals
2024-04-19 12:00 - 13:30 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Jennifer Culbertson
Human languages exhibit striking variation. At the same time, certain linguistic patterns crop up again and again, while others seem to be extremely rare. What these tantalising observations tell us about human language is one of the most contentious questions in linguistics. Do similarities between languages reflect a special capacity for language that has evolved only in humans? Do they reflect more general features of the human mind, potentially shared with our ancestors? Are they just down to accidents of history? Traditionally, linguists have argued for one or another of these answers based on limited sources of evidence. For example, it is common to base claims on small samples of languages, case studies of how a handful of languages change over time, or examples of how individual languages are learned. In this talk, I highlight problems with these traditional sources of evidence and survey what I see as the solution: cross-cultural experiments. I show how this approach can be used to bring crucial empirical evidence to bear on how language is shaped (or not!) by the human linguistic and cognitive system.

Linking Speech Rhythms Inside and Outside the Brain
2024-05-21 - 2024-05-22 | B011 LPL, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
The workshop “Linking Speech Rhythms Inside and Outside the Brain”
The workshop will feature several short presentations and panel discussions aimed at achieving a better understanding of the relationship between oscillatory patterns of activity observed during speech processing in neurophysiological data and signals representing characteristics of speech utterances.

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).

Subdivide and Conquer. brain processing of musical melody, harmony and rhythm
2024-05-24 11:00 - 13:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Peter Vuust : Director of the Center for Music in the Brain (MIB), MSc, PhD, Prof. in Neuroscience, Dept. of Clinical Medicine, Aarhus University, Prof. in Music, the Royal Academy of Music, Aarhus/Aalborg, Denmark, Bassist and composer

Music is ubiquitous across human cultures—as a source of affective and pleasurable experience, moving us both physically and emotionally—and learning to play music shapes both brain structure and function. Music processing in the brain—namely, perception of melody, harmony, and rhythm—has traditionally been studied as an auditory phenomenon using passive listening paradigms. However, when listening to music, we actively generate predictions about what is likely to happen next. This enactive aspect has led to a more complete understanding of music processing involving brain structures implicated in action, emotion, and learning.
The present talk is highlights how music perception, action, emotion, and learning all rest on the human brain’s fundamental capacity for prediction—as formulated by the predictive coding of music model and elucidates how this formulation of music perception and expertise in individuals can be extended to account for the dynamics and underlying brain mechanisms of collective music making. This sheds new light on what makes music meaningful from a neuroscientific perspective.

About Peter Vuust
Professor Peter Vuust, Ph.D. is a unique combination of a top-level jazz musician and a world class scientist. He leads the Danish National Research Foundation’s Center for Music In the Brain” and holds joint appointments as full professor at the Danish Royal Academy of Music and Dept of Clinical Medicine, Aarhus University.
He has published more than 150 scientific papers in high ranking international journals, most recently the review “Music in the brain” in Nature Reviews Neuroscience (March, 2022). He uses state-of-the-art brain scanning techniques such as fMRI, PET, EEG, MEG and behavioral measures and is a world leading expert in the field of music and the brain – a research field he has single-handedly built up in Denmark as leader of the center for Music In the Brain (MIB) currently employing more than 30 researchers. Among many other grants, he has received DKK 98 million (~ US $ 15 billion) as PI, from the Danish National Research Foundation.
In addition, Prof Vuust is a renowned jazz bassist and composer; leading the Peter Vuust Quartet with Alex Riel, Lars Jansson and Ove Ingemarsson of which seven records have been released so far. He has also played on more than 100 recordings and been sideman with international jazz stars such as Lars Jansson, Tim Hagans, John Abercrombie, Dave Liebman and many more. He is the recipient of the 2009 Jazz Society of Aarhus’ “Gaffel”-prize. His album “September Song” was widely acclaimed by reviewers and received a nomination for a Danish Music Award in 2014. In 2022, he released the album “Further to Fly”, which contained jazz arrangements by Peter Vuust of the Songs of Paul Simon with unanimously excellent reviews.
As professor at the Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus, Denmark, he has taught electric and acoustic bass as well as music theory, ear training and ensemble playing. He has given many keynote talks and masterclasses at international conferences and institutions on a wide range of topics ranging from the neuroscience of music to improvisation and composition. He has written three monograph’s “Polyrhythm and –meter in modern jazz; a study of Miles Davis’ Quintet from the 1960s”, “Music on the Brain”, and most recently a book on musical leadership.

Conference on Multilingualism
2024-06-10 - 2024-06-12
The Conference on Multilingualism (COM) 2024 will be held from June 10th to 12th at ”Le Cube” on the campus of Aix-Marseille Université, in the beautiful city of Aix-en-Provence. It is an annual international venue for research on bilingualism and multilingualism and follows recent COM meetings, held in Ghent, Leiden, Reading and most recently Konstanz.
Abstracts will be accepted from a wide range of topics involving the study of bilingualism or multilingualism, from education to neuroscience.
Submissions :
We look forward to seeing you in Aix!
For more information visit our website:
https://multilingualism.sciencesconf.org/
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Administrative support: Nadéra Bureau
Local Organizing committee:
F.-Xavier Alario, Elin Runnqvist, Núria Gala, Kristof Strijkers, Marco Cappellini, Cheryl Frenck-Mestre, Clément François

Scientific committee:
Ian Cunnings (University of Reading)
Cheryl Frenck-Mestre (Université Aix Marseille)
Robert Hartsuiker (Gent University)
Niels Schiller (University of Leiden)
Ludovica Serratrice (University of Reading)

Development of the lexical-semantic organization in the infant brain: electrophysiological evidence
2024-06-14 12:00 - 13:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Dr. Pia Rämä
Until recently, there has been little evidence regarding how and when infants begin to integrate words into an inter-connected lexical-semantic system. Recent event-related potential (ERP) studies show that lexical-semantic system emerges together with early vocabulary during the second year of life (Rämä et al., 2013; Rämä et al., 2018). These studies also suggest that the N400 component is an useful tool to investigate lexical-semantic development in infancy. Some further evidence shows that lexical-semantic organization develops later in bilingual than in monolingual infants. There is mixed evidence as to whether lexical-semantic activation occurs similarly in dominant and non-dominant languages in bilingual language learners (e.g., Sirri & Rämä, 2019). In my talk, I will present our findings regarding neurophysiological mechanisms underlying lexical-semantic activation in monolingual and bilingual infants, and I will also describe my recent findings on the effect of speaker familiarity on processing of word meanings.
References
Rämä, P., Sirri, L., & Serres, J. (2013). Development of lexical–semantic language system: N400 priming effect for spoken words in 18-and 24-month old children. Brain and language, 125(1), 1-10.
Rämä, P., Sirri, L., & Goyet, L. (2018). Event-related potentials associated with cognitive mechanisms underlying lexical-semantic processing in monolingual and bilingual 18-month-old children. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 47, 123-130.
Sirri, L., & Rämä, P. (2019). Similar and distinct neural mechanisms underlying semantic priming in the languages of the French–Spanish bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 22(1), 93-102.

International Workshop on Language Production (IWoLP 2024)
2024-06-26 08:00 - 2024-06-28 17:00 | Site du Pharo, 58 boulevard Charles Livon, Marseille, 13007, France
WoLP, 20th anniversary edition!

The IWoLP series returns to Marseille 20 years after its launching event, back in the summer of 2004.
The workshop is a venue for multi-disciplinary discussion of cognitive science research on how the brain produces language. Each event is organized around poster sessions, and a few hour-long keynote-style talks. Details about the previous editions can be found online.
IWoLP 2024 Web site : https://iwolp-2024.sciencesconf.org/

ILCB welcome back party – ILCB fête de la rentrée
2024-09-27
We invite you to join the ILCB welcome back party on Friday the 27th of September at 9:30 in the gardens of the LPL. This will be an opportunity to welcome our three ILCB IMERA residents who kindly accepted to give talks and to celebrate some more good news, which I will tell you about.
Program
9:30 -10:00 Acceuil/Reception coffee
10:00-10:40 Suzanne Fuchs Moving while talking
11:00- 11:40 Antoni Rodriguez-Fornells Language information-seeking in infants
12:00 12:40 Peter Simor The Wandering Mind in Sleep and Wakefulness
13:00 Lunch in the garden
