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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]