Simplicity and Expressivity Compete in Cultural Evolution : Linguistic Structure is the Result by Simon KIRBY (University of Edinburgh, UK) Language, like other human behaviours, exhibits striking systematic structure. For example, two central design features of human language are the way in which sentences are composed of recombinable words, and the way in which those […]

Speech perception across the adult lifespan with clinically normal hearings by Christian FULLGRABE (MRC Institute of Hearing Research, Nottingham, UK) Subjective reports suggest that older listeners experience increased listening difficulties in noisy environments, and experimental investigations seem to confirm this age-dependent deficit. However, older persons are generally unaware of their peripheral hearing status (i.e., the […]

Runt yak wahoo : baboon speak by Caralyn KEMP (BLRI) Primates vocalise to maintain contact with conspecifics, warn of predators, alert group members to food and to advertise territory, sexual availability and size, but we know surprisingly little about how and why these calls are produced. Can they be varied and is this context dependent? […]

Sonifying handwriting movements for the diagnosis and the rehabilitation of movement disorders by Jérémy DANNA (BLRI) Except for the slight scratching of the pen, handwriting is a silent activity. Transforming it into an audible activity might sound curious. However, because audition is particularly appropriate for the perception of fine temporal and dynamical differences, using sounds […]

Prosodic phrasing and ambiguity resolution as revealed by brain potentials by Karsten Steinhauer (McGill University, School of Communication Sciences & Disorders, Montréal) Prosodic phrasing has a major impact on our interpretation of utterances. For example, the sentence ""Mary said Peter's brother was the nicest girl at the party"" results in confusion, unless it is presented […]

Etudes de potentiels évoqués sur le traitement de l'accord en langue orale (or ""ERP studies on oral langage processing of agreement"" (en Français)) by Phaedra Royle (École d'orthophonie et d'audiologie, Université de Montréal) Afin d'étudier l'acquisition du traitement de l'accord en genre en français, nous avons développé une étude de potentiels évoqués (PÉs) ayant une […]

Is lexical selection by competition ? by Robert Hartsuiker (Ghent University) There are several contrasting views on the mechanisms of lexical selection in language production. On one view, words compete with each other for selection, so that the time to select one word depends on the activation of competitors. This competitive view is often thought […]

Prosodic Constraints on Children's Variable Production of Grammatical Morphemes by Katherine Demuth (Macquarie University, New South Wales, Australia) Language acquisition researchers have long observed that children's early use of grammatical morphemes is highly variable. It is generally thought that this is due to incomplete syntactic or semantic representations. However, recent crosslinguistic research has found that […]

Synergie in Language Acquisition by Mark Johnson (Macquarie University, New South Wales, Australia) Each human language contains an unbounded number of different sentences. How can something so large and complex possibly be learnt? Over the past decade and a half we've learned how to define probability distributions over grammars and the linguistic structures they generate, […]

What Freud got right about speech errors by Gary S. Dell (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA) Most people associate Sigmund Freud with the assertion that speech errors reveal repressed thoughts, a claim that does not have a great deal of support. I will mention some other things that Freud said about slips, showing that these, […]