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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]