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, […]

Social meaning and speech perception by Benjamin Munson (University of Minnesota, Etats-Unis) It is well established that listeners may categorize ambiguous sounds differently when they are led to believe something about the person who produced them, such as their age, social class, gender, or regional background (Hay, Drager & Nolan, 2006 ; McGowan 2011 ; […]

Vocalisations of Captive Guinea Baboons by Caralyn Kemp (Labex BLRI) As part of a larger study investigating vocal production in Guinea baboons, I have been examining the vocalisations of a captive group at the CNRS primate station in Rousset. The main goal of this aspect of the project was to produce a large-scale database in […]