ILCB

Prosodic and Social Dimensions of Entrainment in Dialogue by Julia Hirschberg
2014-03-18 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Prosodic and Social Dimensions of Entrainment in Dialogue by (Columbia University)
When people speak together, they often adapt aspects of their speaking style based upon the style of their conversational partner. This phenomena goes by many names, including adaptation, alignment, and entrainment, inter alia. In this talk, I will describe experiments in English and Mandarin prosodic entrainment in the Columbia Games Corpus and in the Tongji Games Corpus, large corpora of speech recorded from subjects playing a series of computer games. I will discuss how prosodic entrainment is related to turn-taking behaviors and to several measures of task and dialogue success. I will also discuss experiments relating entrainment to several social dimensions, including likeability and dominance. This is joint work with Stefan Benus, Agustín Gravano, Ani Nenkova, Rivka Levitan, Laura Willson, and Zhihua Xia.

Sensorimotor processing of speech : brain inspired approaches to automatic speech recognition by Luciano Fadiga, Alessandro D'Ausilio, Leonardo Badino
2014-02-13 11:00 - 17:00 (Europe/Paris) | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Sensorimotor processing of speech : brain inspired approaches to automatic speech recognition by Luciano Fadiga, Alessandro D’Ausilio, Leonardo Badino (University of ferrara, Istituto Italiano Di Tecnologia à Gênes)

A Vocal Brain: Cerebral Processing of Voice Information by Pascal Belin
2014-01-24 08:00 - 17:00 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
A Vocal Brain: Cerebral Processing of Voice Information (Institut des Neurosciences de La Timone, Marseille, France)
The human voice carries speech but also a wealth of socially-relevant, speaker-related information. Listeners routinely perceive precious information on the speaker's identity (gender, age), affective state (happy, scared), as well as more subtle cues on perceived personality traits (attractiveness, dominance, etc.), strongly influencing social interactions. Using voice psychoacoustics and neuroimaging techniques, we examine the cerebral processing of person-related information in perceptual and neural voice representations. Results indicate a cerebral architecture of voice cognition sharing many similarities with the cerebral organization of face processing, with the main types of information in voices (identity, affect, speech) processed in interacting, but partly dissociable functional pathways.

La Poesie des synapses ou comment les mots nous font plaisir ou peur ? by Arthur Jacobs
2013-12-20 14:00 - 17:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
La Poesie des synapses ou comment les mots nous font plaisir ou peur ? by Arthur Jacobs (Freie Universität Berlin, Dahlem Institute for Neuroimaging of Emotion (D.I.N.E.))
La lecture n'est pas seulement un processus de traitement d'information, mais elle comporte des réponses affectives et esthétiques qui vont bien au-delà de ce que les modèles actuels de la lecture décrivent. Des mots peuvent nous plaire ou faire mal, des textes nous rendre heureux ou faire pleurer. Mais comment des stimuli ""symboliques"" peuvent-ils évoquer des réponses émotionelles? Quels sont les processus neurocognitifs qui les sous-tendent, et comment les réactions émotionelles à des narrations fictives se distinguent-elles de celles à des narrations factuelles? Dans ce séminaire, j'aborde ces questions dans le cadre d'un modèle neuropoétique de la lecture littéraire qui intègre des éléments de rhétorique, d'esthétique et de poétique cognitive avec des concepts de neurolinguistique et de psychonarrotologie (Jacobs, 2011; 2013). Ces prédictions sont discutées à la lumière des données venant d'études empiriques sur la reconnaissance des mots, la réception de la poésie, et de la compréhension des phrases et textes.

Apprentissage par renforcement (direct et inverse) pour les systèmes interactifs by Olivier Pietquin
2013-12-05 10:00 - 12:00 | LIA, chemin des Meinajariès, Avignon, 84911, France
Apprentissage par renforcement (direct et inverse) pour les systèmes interactifs by Olivier Pietquin (SequeL team, University Lille 1, LIFL CNRS UMR 8022, INRIA Lille)
L'apprentissage par renforcement est une catégorie d'apprentissage automatique qui se différencie des autres par le fait qu'elle a pour objectif l'optimisation d'une séquence de décisions, prenant en compte l'aspect temporel et surtout dirigé par un but du comportement. Cette méthode, d'inspiration biologique, est fondée sur l'accumulation par la machine de récompenses numériques distribuées après chaque décision. Le comportement appris est celui qui maximise, sur le long terme, l'accumulation de récompenses, menant à une séquence de décisions optimale. Ce paradigme d'apprentissage a été introduit dans le domaine des systèmes de dialogue parlé il y a une quinzaine d'année afin d'optimiser les stratégies d'interaction. En effet, ce type de système doit prendre des décisions sur les actes dialogiques à produire à chaque tour d'interaction avec un utilisateur. Ces décisions doivent mener à une interaction la plus naturelle et efficace possible alors que les informations recueillies sont entachées d'erreurs (due à la reconnaissance et la compréhension imparfaites du langage parlé). Il est difficile de définir formellement ce que serait une interaction parfaite, en revanche un utilisateur peut fournir une évaluation a posteriori de cette interaction servant de signal de récompense. Toutefois, un certain nombre de problèmes subsistent encore aujourd'hui pour faire un usage performant de ces méthodes dans le cadre de l'interaction homme-machine. Un de ces problèmes est la définition de la récompense à fournir à la machine pour la voir se comporter de manière naturelle. En effet, l'utilisation de la satisfaction de l'utilisateur a montré quelques limites et est difficile à prédire automatiquement. Dans cet exposé, nous présenterons le paradigme de l'apprentissage par renforcement inverse, visant à estimer la fonction de récompense optimisée par un opérateur humain (supposé optimal) et à la transférer à la machine pour obtenir un comportement similaire dans une tâche d'interaction.

Apprentissage par renforcement : de la modélisation des processus neuraux aux applications robotiques by Medhi Khamassi
2013-12-05 08:00 - 17:00 | LIA, chemin des Meinajariès, Avignon, 84911, France
Apprentissage par renforcement : de la modélisation des processus neuraux aux applications robotiques by Medhi Khamassi (l’Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique (UPMC))
L'activité phasique des neurones dopaminergiques est considérée depuis une quinzaine d'années comme le substrat neural de signaux d'erreur de prédiction de la récompense (RPE). Ces signaux se sont avérés très proches des signaux d'erreurs générés par les algorithmes d'apprentissage par renforcement (RL). De plus, de nombreuses études ont montré que les algorithmes RL permettaient de bien décrire l'apprentissage animal et humain pendant des tâches de conditionnement pavlovien. Ceci a conduit au développement d'un nombre croissant de modèles computationnels d'apprentissage par renforcement pour décrire les processus neuraux sous-jacents à ces apprentissages. La première partie de l'intervention présentera une introduction à ces modèles, à leur formalisme, et aux données montrant qu'ils permettent de bien décrire certaines activités cérébrales liées à l'apprentissage.
Toutefois, ces modèles d'apprentissage par renforcement commencent à montrer leurs limites, dont l'une est celle du passage à l'échelle, dans le monde réel. Lorsque l'on sort du cadre des simulations parfaites et simplifiées des tâches de laboratoire et que l'on se place dans le cadre de l'interaction réaliste d'un robot avec son environnement, on se rend compte que ces algorithmes ont beaucoup de mal à faire face au bruit, à l'incertitude, aux délais. L'application de ces modèles d'apprentissage au contrôle d'un robot montre que pour réussir à obtenir une bonne performance du robot, il faut faire en plus des hypothèses sur l'interaction de ces modèles avec d'autres systèmes d'apprentissage et avec d'autres processus cognitifs tels que la perception, la cartographie, la navigation. Je montrerai en particulier comment des algorithmes combinant deux types d'apprentissage, dits model-free et model-based, permettent de donner une meilleure performance comportementale au robot et d'expliquer également un plus grand nombre de données expérimentales, en particulier dans des tâches de navigation.

Electrophysiological tools to assess brain activity by Eduardo Martinez-Montes
2013-11-22 08:00 - 17:00
Electrophysiological tools to assess brain activity by Eduardo Martinez-Montes (Head of the Neuroinformatics Department, Cuban Neuroscience Center)
The development of a wide variety of neuroimaging methods based on Magnetic Resonance Imaging has opened new ways for studying brain organization and functioning with high spatial resolution. It is also becoming increasingly clear that the complex functions of the human brain such as cognition, language, attention and several pathologies are not fully explained by only considering the activation of spatially fixed cerebral structures. Rather we need to consider brain functioning as networks of structures that dynamically interact through electrical signals coded by different frequencies. To thoroughly investigate the dynamics of such networks it is important to also use other techniques such as EEG and MEG, which provide direct measurements of the brain electrical activity with high temporal resolution. In this talk, we will present classical and novel strategies for the analysis of EEGMEG data, from statistical measures for detection of the Event Related Brain Dynamics, to methods of dimensionality reduction and the combination of multidimensional analysis with source localization methods. We will describe new approaches for obtaining space-time-frequency characterization of brain electrical activity at the level of neural sources.

Vocalisations of Captive Guinea Baboons by Caralyn Kemp
2013-10-25 11:00 - 12:00 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
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 order to 1) characterise the vocal repertoire of this baboon species, 2) determine the acoustic features of the vocalisations, and 3) test the descriptive adequacy of existing categories. Twelve vocalisations were distinguishable by ear, but not all vocalisations were produced by all age and sex groups. A single vocalisation type could occur in different contexts and some vocalisations had a large degree of variability. This database will be useful for new researchers and care staff who work with Guinea baboons in captivity as well as aiding in our understanding of the evolution of vocal communication between baboon taxa and within the primate genera.

Social meaning and speech perception by Benjamin Munson
2013-09-06 11:00 - 12:30 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
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 ; Staum Casasanto 2008 ; Strand & Johnson 1996). This talk will review a set of studies designed to examine two aspects of this phenomenon. First, are the effects different depending on the specific social meaning ascribed to the variation (i.e., what is it about gender that makes listeners change their categorizations when the speaker is suggested to be a man or a woman?). Second, do these effects occur relatively early and automatically in processing, or do they reflect ambiguity resolutions that occur relatively late in processing ?

What Freud got right about speech errors by Gary S. Dell
2013-09-06 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
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, in contrast to the repression notion, do fit well with some modern theories of language production. I will illustrate using the interactive two-step theory of lexical access during production, which we have used to understand aspects of aphasic speech error patterns

Synergie in Language Acquisition by Mark Johnson
2013-08-29 10:00 - 12:30 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
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, making it possible to define statistical models that learn regularities of complex linguistic structures. Bayesian approaches are particularly attractive because they can exploit ""prior"" (e.g., innate) knowledge as well as learn statistical generalizations from the input.

This talk compares two different Bayesian models of language acquisition. A staged learner learns the components of language independently of each other, while a joint learner learns them simultaneously. A joint learner can take advantages of synergistic dependencies between linguistic components to bootstrap acquisition in ways that a staged learner cannot. We use Bayesian models to show that there are dependencies between word reference, syllable structure and the lexicon that a learner could take advantage of to synergistically improve language acquisition.

Prosodic Constraints on Children's Variable Production of Grammatical Morphemes by Katherine Demuth
2013-08-29 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
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 the variable production of grammatical morphemes such as articles and verbal inflections is phonologically conditioned. Thus, children are more likely to produce grammatical morphemes in simple phonological contexts than in those that are more complex. This suggests that some of the variability in children's early production (and perception) of grammatical morphemes may be due to phonological context effects, and that some aspects of children's syntactic/semantic representations may be in place earlier than typically assumed. This raises important theoretical and methodological issues for investigating syntactic knowledge in L1 acquisition, but also in bilinguals, L2 children and adults, and those with language impairment (SLI, bilinguals, children with hearing loss). Implications for understanding the mechanisms underlying language processing, the 'perception-production' gap, and a developmental model of speech planning, are discussed.

Is lexical selection by competition ? by Robert Hartsuiker
2013-06-07 16:00 - 18:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
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 to be supported by semantic interference in picture-word tasks (name the picture, ignore the distractor word). But on another view, the time to select a word depends only on the activation of the highest activated lexical unit. This account is consistent with semantic facilitation in some versions of the picture-word task, but requires an additional mechanism to account for semantic interference effects. Our work of the last few years has tested whether this mechanism is one of self-monitoring and covert error repair. On this view, the distractor sometimes gets ahead of the picture name in production process. To prevent the inadvertent naming of the distractor, it therefore needs to be filtered out covertly, and the more difficult it is to detect and rule out the distractor, the more naming will be delayed. To test this account, we have conducted behavioral experiments and EEG experiments that manipulated parameters we suspect the self-monitoring system to be sensitive to, such as lexical status of the distractor, context (i.e., composition of list of stimuli), and even taboo status of the distractor word. Based on my review of this evidence I will argue that response exclusion by self-monitoring is a viable alternative to lexical selection by competition.

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
2013-05-29 16:00 - 17:30 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
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 interface auditivo-visuelle avec un appariement d'images et de phrases ciblant l'accord intra-nomial. Ce domaine du français est difficile à maîtriser, étant donné la nature irrégulière des marques de l'accord en genre. Les conditions incongruentes présentaient des erreurs du genre pour le déterminant (Det-N « la soulier brun »), et l'adjectif (N-Adj « le soulier « brune »), mais aussi des conditions sémantiquement où le nom et l'image étaient incongruents (par ex. l'enfant voit [un soulier brun] et entend « un POISSON brun ») Deux groupes ont participé à l'étude. Le premier, des jeunes adultes francophones, ont été assignés aléatoirement à deux sous-groupes : avec ou sans tâche. Cette manipulation visait à vérifier si les PÉs obtenus sans tâche étaient similaires à ceux obtenus avec jugement de grammaticalité, étant donné qu'on ne demanderait pas aux enfants de faire de jugement. Les deux groups d'adultes ont montré les PÉs attendus (N400, LAN, P600) en plus d'une onde PMN (Phoneme mismatch negativity) dans les conditions sémantiques et Det-N. L'effet de tâche a été important, en particulier pour l'onde P600 qui montrait une amplitude considérablement plus grande dans le groupe Tâche.

Le second groupe de participants était des enfants âgés de 5 à 9 ans (N=50). Aucune tâche ne leur était demandée mis à part de porter attention à l'histoire racontée (une extraterrestre qui apprend le français au cours de son voyage intergalactique vers le Québec). Nos analyses préliminaires démontrent que ce paradigme induit des composantes chez les enfants qui sont à la fois similaires (N400, P600) et différentes (LAN) de ceux des adultes. Les données des adultes démontrent que les jugements de grammaticalité ne sont pas une précondition à l'apparition de certaines ondes PÉs linguistiques dans des tâches orales. Les différences d?ondes entres les conditions sémantiques et (non)grammaticales appuient une dissociation entre les processus de vérification grammaticale et l'accès lexical dans la vérification de l'accord. Les données préliminaires des enfants démontrent l'utilité de ce paradigme pour l'étude de l'acquisition de processus grammaticaux et lexicaux-sémantiques chez les enfants tout venant qui pourraient maîtriser l'accord mais néanmoins faire des erreurs de production. tâches orales. Les différences d?ondes entres les conditions sémantiques et (non)grammaticales appuient une dissociation entre les processus de vérification grammaticale et l'accès lexical dans la vérification de l'accord. Les données préliminaires des enfants démontrent l'utilité de ce paradigme pour l'étude de l'acquisition de processus grammaticaux et lexicaux-sémantiques chez les enfants tout venant qui pourraient maîtriser l'accord mais néanmoins faire des erreurs de production.

Prosodic phrasing and ambiguity resolution as revealed by brain potentials by Karsten Steinhauer
2013-05-24 16:00 - 17:30 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
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 with prosodic boundaries before and after ""said Peter's brother"". Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) provide an excellent tool to investigate the temporal dynamics of language processing in real-time. In the domain of prosody, distinct ERP components immediately reflect both the processing of prosodic boundaries as well as the subsequent integration of prosody with other types of linguistic information. In my talk, I will give an overview of this research area. After a brief introduction to ERPs, I will review a number of auditory and visual ERP studies and address questions such as: How much time does our brain need to take advantage of prosodic cues? When do children's brains learn to use this information? Does prosodic information play a role during silent reading? Are the brain mechanisms underlying prosodic phrasing in speech comparable to those involved in musical phrasing? How do we integrate multiple (conflicting) boundaries within the same utterance?

Sonifying handwriting movements for the diagnosis and the rehabilitation of movement disorders by Jérémy DANNA
2013-04-12 16:00 - 18:00 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
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 to gain information about handwriting movements seems judicious. We use the sonification that consists in adding synthetic sounds to silent movements in order to provide support for information processing activities. The idea is to associate a melodious sound, which flows, to a fluent handwriting, and a dissonant sound, which squeaks, to a jerky handwriting. By sonifying the relevant variables of handwriting in dysgraphic children or in Parkinsonian patients, it could be possible to detect their handwritings troubles 'by ear' only.

My talk will be organized in two parts. First, I will expose an experiment showing that adding relevant auditory information is sufficient for discriminating the handwriting of dysgraphic children and the skilled handwriting of proficient children 'by ear' only. I will also present an experiment in progress in which real-time auditory feedback are supplied to help dysgraphic children to improve their handwriting movements. Secondly, I will present the BLRI project that consists in using computerized analysis and sonification of handwriting movements for the early diagnosis of Parkinson Disease.

Runt yak wahoo : baboon speak by Caralyn KEMP
2013-04-12 16:00 - 17:30 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
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? Are these calls vocal responses to emotional states or can they be produced voluntarily? How does the production of these calls compare to human speech? Studying these questions not only helps us to understand what our closest relatives are saying, but also helps us to understand the evolution of our own speech. As part of a larger study considering these questions, I am examining the vocalisations of a captive group of Guinea baboons at the Primate Cognition and Behavior Platform in Rousset. The main goal of this aspect of the project is to produce a large-scale database in order to 1) characterise the vocal repertoire of this baboon species, 2) determine the acoustic features of the vocalisations, and 3) test the descriptive adequacy of existing categories. Determining the precise repertoire of baboon vocalisations will allow us to specify the 'acoustic space' that the vocal track of baboons can produce and how this compares to human vowel production. Taking into consideration the social context in which these vocalisations are produced and how specific situations alter vocal production, we aim to determine whether the baboons are capable of producing these calls voluntarily.

Speech perception across the adult lifespan with clinically normal hearings by Christian FULLGRABE
2013-04-05 16:00 - 18:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
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 presence of a hearing loss) and most published studies used lax audiometric inclusion criteria. Hence, lower speech intelligibility could, at least partially, be explained by a reduction in audibility with age. Also, most aging studies limited their age comparison to groups of ""young"" (e.g. ≤ 30 years) and ""older"" listeners (e.g. ≥ 60 years), making it impossible to pinpoint the onset of the putative age effect. This talk will present two cross-sectional investigations of central age effects on speech perception, using participants with clinically normal hearing. Performance on supra-threshold temporal-processing and a battery of cognitive tasks (including tests of processing speed, working memory and attention) was assessed, and compared with speech identification in quiet and in different (steady and fluctuating) background noises. To determine when during adulthood a decline with age in these abilities first becomes apparent, participants were sampled continuously from the entire adult age range (18-91 years). Despite a large individual variability, the results show an age-dependent decline in speech identification, especially above 70 years. Sensitivity to temporal information and cognitive performance deteriorated as early as middle age, and both correlated with speech-in-noise perception.

Simplicity and Expressivity Compete in Cultural Evolution : Linguistic Structure is the Result by Simon KIRBY
2013-02-15 11:00 - 13:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
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 words in turn are created out of combinations of reusable sounds. These properties make language unique among communication systems and enable us to convey an open-ended array of messages.

Recently, researchers have turned to cultural evolution as a possible mechanism to explain systematic structure such as this in language. In this talk, I will briefly present a series of experiments and a computational model that demonstrate why this is a promising avenue for research. Using diffusion chain methods in the laboratory, we can observe how behaviour evolves as it is transmitted through repeated cycles of learning and production (a process known as ""iterated learning""). Across a wide range of experimental contexts, we observe an apparent universal: behaviour transmitted by iterated learning becomes increasingly compressible. When combined with a pressure to also be expressive, this may be sufficient to deliver up the structural design features of language.

Although this work is focussed on human language as a test case, the conclusions are quite general. Cultural transmission by iterated learning is an adaptive process that delivers systematic structure for free.

Decomposition makes things worse: A discrimination learning approach to the time course of understanding compounds in reading by Harald Baayen
2013-02-15 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Decomposition makes things worse: A discrimination learning approach to the time course of understanding compounds in reading by (Eberhard Karls University, Tübingen, Allemagne)
The current literature on morphological processing is dominated by the view that reading a complex word is a two-staged process, with an early blind morphemic decomposition process followed by a late process of semantic recombination (Taft, 2004; Rastle and Davis, 2008a). Various behavioral and magneto- and electroencephalography studies suggest semantic recombination would take place approximately 300-500 ms post onset of the visual stimulus (Lavric et al., 2007). However, eye-tracking studies show that both simple and complex words are read at a rate of 4 to 5 words/second (Rayner, 1998). We report an eye-tracking experiment tracing the reading of English compounds in simple sentences. For about 33% of the trials, a single fixation sufficed for understanding the meaning of the compound. For such trials, the meaning of the compound was available already some 140 ms after the eye first landed on the modifier. All first fixations also revealed an effect of the semantic relatedness of the modifier and head constituents, gauged with a latent
semantic analysis (LSA) similarity measure. These results indicate a much earlier involvement of semantics than predicted by the first-form-then-meaning scenario. Second and subsequent fixation durations revealed that at later processing stages very different semantic processes were involved, gauged by modifier-compound and head-compound LSA similarity measures. Computational modeling of the first fixation with naive discrimination learning (Baayen et al., 2011) indicated that the early (and only the early) semantic effect arises due to the model's connection weights' sensitivity to the collocational co-occurence statistics of orthographic and semantic information carried by word trigrams. We understand the LSA effects arising at later fixations as
reflecting semantic processes seeking to resolve the uncertainty about the targeted meaning that arises as an unintended and time-costly side effect of later fixations causing the head's meaning to be co-activated along with the compound's meaning. Instead of viewing blind morphological decomposition as the gateway through which meaning can be reached, we think that when the meaning of the head becomes available, due to the (non-morphological) nature of visual information uptake when the initial landing position of the eye is non-optimal, understanding comes with greater cognitive costs: Decomposition makes things worse. We speculate that the late semantic effects in the electrophysiological literature, especially those around the N400 time window, reflect late semantic cleaning operations.

Quantitative models of early language acquisition by Emmanuel Dupoux
2012-12-21 08:00 - 17:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Quantitative models of early language acquisition by Emmanuel Dupoux
The past 40 years of psycholinguistic research has shown that infants learn their first language at an impressive speed. During the first year of life, even before they start to talk, infants converge on the basic building blocks of the phonological structure of their language. Yet, the mechanisms that they use to achieve this early phonological acquisition are still not well known. We show that a modeling approach based on machine learning algorithms and speech technology applied to large speech databases can help to shed light on the early pattern of development. First, we argue that because of acoustic variability, phonemes cannot be acquired directly from the acoustic signal; only highly context dependent and talker dependent phones or phones fragments can be extracted in a bottom-up way. Second, words cannot be acquired directly from the acoustic signal either, but a small number of protowords or sentence fragments can be extracted on the basis of repetition frequency. Third, these two kinds of protolinguistic units can interact with one another in order to converge with more abstract units. The proposal is therefore that the different levels of the phonological system are acquired in parallel, through increasingly more precise approximations. This accounts for the largely overlapping development of lexical and phonological knowledge during the first year of life.

Cartographie des fonctions du Langage par stimulation électrique corticale by Jean-François Demonet
2012-11-23 16:00 - 18:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France

Sound change and its relationship to variation in production and categorization in perception by Jonathan Harrington
2012-10-29 10:00 - 17:00 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Sound change and its relationship to variation in production and categorization in perception by Jonathan Harrington (Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing, Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich, Germany)
In some models (Lindblom et al, 1995; Bybee, 2002), sound change is associated with the type of synchronic reduction that occurs in prosodically weak and semantically predictable contexts. In other models (Ohala, 1993), sound change can be brought about through listeners’ misperception of coarticulation in speech production. The talk will draw upon both models in order to explore whether coarticulatory misperception is more likely in prosodically weak contexts. In order to do so, the magnitude of trans-consonantal vowel coarticulation was investigated in /pV1pV2l/ non-words with the pitch-accent falling either on the first or second syllable and in which V1 = /ʊ, ʏ/ and V2 = /e, o/. The analysis of these words produced by 20 L1-German speakers showed that prosodic weakening caused vowel undershoot in /ʊ/ but had little effect on V2-on-V1 coarticulation. In a perception experiment, a V1 = /ʊ-ʏ/ continuum was synthesised and the same speakers made forced choice judgements to the same non-words with the prosody manipulated such that stress was perceived on V1 or on V2. Listeners compensated for V2-on-V1 coarticulation; however, the magnitude of compensation was less in the prosodically weak than in the strong context. The general conclusion is that segmental context influences both the dynamics of speech production and perceptual categorization, but not always in the same way: it is this divergence between the two which may be especially likely in prosodically weak contexts and which may, in turn, facilitate sound change.

ReferencesBybee, J. (2002). Word frequency and context of use in the lexical diffusion of phonetically conditioned sound change. Language Variation Change, 14, 261–290. Lindblom, B., Guion, S., Hura, S., Moon, S. J., and Willerman, R. (1995). Is sound change adaptive? Rivista di Linguistica, 7, 5–36. Ohala, J. J. (1993). Sound change as nature’s speech perception experiment. Speech Communication, 13, 155–161.

The communicative basis of word order by Ted GIBSON
2012-10-19 16:00 - 18:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
The communicative basis of word order by Ted GIBSON (MIT)
Some recent evidence suggests that subject-object-verb (SOV) may be the default word order for human language. For example, SOV is the preferred word order in a task where participants gesture event meanings (Goldin-Meadow et al. 2008). Critically, SOV gesture production occurs not only for speakers of SOV languages, but also for speakers of SVO languages, such as English, Chinese, Spanish (Goldin-Meadow et al. 2008) and Italian (Langus & Nespor, 2010). The gesture-production task therefore plausibly reflects default word order independent of native language. However, this leaves open the question of why there are so many SVO languages (41.2% of languages; Dryer, 2005). We propose that the high percentage of SVO languages cross-linguistically is due to communication pressures over a noisy channel (Jelinek, 1975; Brill & Moore, 2000; Levy et al. 2009). In particular, we propose that people understand that the subject will tend to be produced before the object (a near universal cross-linguistically; Greenberg, 1963). Given this bias, people will produce SOV word order – the word order that Goldin-Meadow et al. show is the default – when there are cues in the input that tell the comprehender who the subject and the object are. But when the roles of the event participants are not disambiguated by the verb, then the noisy channel model predicts either (i) a shift to the SVO word order, in order to minimize the confusion between SOV and OSV, which are minimally different; or (ii) the invention of case marking, which can also disambiguate the roles of the event participants. We test the predictions of this hypothesis and provide support for it using gesture experiments in English, Japanese and Korean. We also provide evidence for the noisy channel model in language understanding in English.

Evelina FEDORENKO
2012-10-19 11:00 - 12:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Evelina FEDORENKO (MIT)

What cognitive and neural mechanisms do we use to understand language? Since Broca's and Wernicke's seminal discoveries in the 19th century, a broad array of brain regions have been implicated in linguistic processing spanning frontal, temporal and parietal lobes, both hemispheres, and subcortical and cerebellar structures. However, characterizing the precise contribution of these different structures to linguistic processing has proven challenging. In this talk I will argue that high-level linguistic processing - including understanding individual word meanings and combining them into more complex structures/meanings - is accomplished by the joint engagement of two functionally and computationally distinct brain systems. The first is comprised of the classic “language regions” on the lateral surfaces of left frontal and temporal lobes that appear to be functionally specialized for linguistic processing (e.g., Fedorenko et al., 2011; Monti et al., 2009, 2012). And the second is the fronto-parietal ""multiple demand"" network, a set of regions that are engaged across a wide range of cognitive demands (e.g., Duncan, 2001, 2010). Most past neuroimaging work on language processing has not explicitly distinguished between these two systems, especially in the frontal lobes, where subsets of each system reside side by side within the region referred to as “Broca’s area” (Fedorenko et al., in press). Using methods which surpass traditional neuroimaging methods in sensitivity and functional resolution (Fedorenko et al., 2010; Nieto-Castañon & Fedorenko, in press; Saxe et al., 2006), we are beginning to characterize the important roles played by both domain-specific and domain-general brain regions in linguistic processing.

Rudiments de langage chez les primates non-humains ? by Alban LEMASSON
2012-10-12 16:00 - 17:30 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Rudiments de langage chez les primates non-humains ? by Alban LEMASSON (Université de Rennes 1, Institut universitaire de France)
La communication vocale des primates non-humains a longtemps été considérée comme déterminée uniquement génétiquement et émotionnellement, encourageant les théoriciens de l’origine du langage humain à en rechercher les précurseurs ailleurs, notamment dans les gestes des grands singes. Pourtant, les études menées au cours des dix dernières années, particulièrement sur les cris des cercopithèques forestiers, démontrent un parallèle avec plusieurs caractéristiques fondamentales du langage (p.ex. sémantique, affixation, syntaxe, prosodie, conversation, accommodation et convergence vocale). Les différences entre le langage humain et la communication vocale des singes, qui sont des actes sociaux comparables, seraient donc plus d’ordre quantitatif que qualitatif

Not all skilled readers have cracked the code: The role of lexical expertise in skilled reading by Sally Andrews
2012-09-28 16:00 - 18:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Not all skilled readers have cracked the code: The role of lexical expertise in skilled reading by Sally Andrews (University of Sydney)
Most theories and computational models of skilled reading have been built upon average data for unselected samples of university students, reflecting an implicit assumption that all skilled readers read in the same way. I will review evidence that challenges this assumption by demonstrating that individual differences in measures of written language proficiency predict systematic variability in both the early stages of lexical retrieval indexed by masked priming, and in tasks assessing the contribution of lexical retrieval to sentence processing. These data highlight the critical role played by precise lexical representations in supporting optimally efficient reading.

Entropy Reduction and Asian Language by John Hale
2012-09-25 10:00 - 12:00 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Entropy Reduction and Asian Language by John Hale (Cornell University, NY, USA)
This talk presents a particular conceptualization of human language understanding as information processing. From this viewpoint, understanding a sentence word-by-word is a kind of incomplete perception problem in which comprehenders over time become more certain about the linguistic structure of the utterance they are trying to understand. The Entropy Reduction hypothesis holds that the scale of these certainty-increases reflects psychological effort. This claim revives the application of information theory to psycholinguistics, which languished since the 1950s. But in contrast to that earlier work, modern applications of information theory to language-understanding now use generative grammars to specify the relevant structures and their probabilities. This representation makes it possible to apply standard techniques from computational linguistics to work out weighted ""expectations"" about as-yet-unheard words. The talk exemplifies the general theory using examples from Chinese, Japanese & Korean. The prenomial character of relative clauses in these languages is an important test case for any general cognitive theory of sentence processing.

Si tous les chemins mènent à Rome, ils ne se valent pas tous. Le problème d'accès lexical en production by Michael ZOCK
2012-09-21 16:00 - 18:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Si tous les chemins mènent à Rome, ils ne se valent pas tous. Le problème d’accès lexical en production by Michael ZOCK (Laboratoire d’Informatique Fondamentale, CNRS & Aix-Marseille Université)
Tout le monde a déjà rencontré le problème suivant : on cherche un mot (ou le nom d'une personne) que l’on connaît, sans être en mesure d’y accéder à temps. Les travaux des psychologues ont montré que les personnes se trouvant dans cet état savent énormément de choses concernant le mot recherché (sens, nombre de syllabes, origine, etc.), et que les mots avec lequel ils le confondent lui ressemblent étrangement (lettre ou son initial, catégorie syntaxique, champ sémantique, etc.). Mon objectif (à long terme) est de réaliser un programme tirant bénéfice de cet état de faits pour assister un locuteur ou rédacteur à (re)trouver le mot qu’il a sur le bout de la langue. À cette fin, je prévois d’ajouter à un dictionnaire électronique existant un index d’association (collocations rencontrées dans un grand corpus). Autrement dit, je propose de construire un dictionnaire analogue à celui des êtres humains, qui, outre les informations conventionnelles (définition, forme écrite, informations grammaticales) contiendrait des liens (associations), permettant de naviguer entre les idées (concepts) et leurs expressions (mots). Un tel dictionnaire permettrait donc l’accès à l’information recherchée soit par la forme (lexicale : analyse), soit par le sens (concepts : production), soit par les deux. Ma démarche est fondée sur plusieurs hypothèses. 1° Les stratégies de recherche dans notre dictionnaire mental dépendent, bien entendu, de la représentation des mots dans notre cerveau. Hélas, on n'a toujours pas une carte précise de cette organisation. Quant à la recherche on pourrait dire qu'elle s'opère essentiellement sur deux axes : Le premier décrit le passage des idées à leurs expression (idées, forme, sons). Cette vision représente l'ordre naturel des « choses » : partant du sens on va vers l'expression (forme sonore ou graphique du mot) en passant par les concepts lexicaux (lèmmes dans la théorie de Levelt). Le deuxième axe est plus proche de ce qu'on peut considérer comme une forme d'organisation de mots. Il représente leur usage (fréquent/typique) dans le discours. C'est un graphe de co-occurences ou d'associations. Il y a donc deux idées complémentaires : (a) l'expression des idées au sens restreint (passage des concepts aux mots) et (b) les rôles que ces idées (concepts/mots) peuvent jouer dans le cadre d'une phrase (discours, contextes possibles des mots). Ce contexte précise d'ailleurs souvent le sens des mots. Si le 1er axe représente la voie naturelle en production, voie empruntée pratiquement en toutes circonstances (plan A), le 2ème axe (voie associative) est la voie de rechange (plan-B), utilisée en cas d'échec du plan A. Le premier processus est automatique (rapide et inconscient), tandis que le second est contrôlé, donc lent est accessible à notre conscience. C'est lui qui m'intéresse, car il reflète la situation dans laquelle un auteur se trouve lorsqu'il fait appel à un dictionnaire ou thesaurus. 2° Le dictionnaire mental est un vaste réseau dont les noeuds sont des concepts ou mots (lemmes ou expressions) et les liens essentiellement des associations. Etant donné que tout est lié, tout peut être trouvén du moins en principe : il suffit de suivre des bons liens. Chercher un mot consisterait donc d?entrer dans ce réseau, puis de suivre les liens pour (re)trouver le terme faisant obstruction. 3° Le dictionnaire mental est à la fois un dictionnaire et une encyclopédie. Etant donné que les mots sont utilisés pour coder des connaissances du monde, ces dernières peuvent être sollicitées pour nous aider à retrouver le mot recherché (ainsi le terme 'baguette' pourrait-il être obtenu à partir de 'restaurant chinois' ou à partir de 'type de couvert'). Tout nous fera penser à qc, tout est associé à qc. De ce fait, tout est susceptible d'être évoqué par un terme lié, fût-il indirect (chaîne associative; recherche à plusieurs pas). 4° Les informations permettant d'effectuer ce type de navigation (atlas sémantique) se trouvent non seulement dans notre cerveau, mais aussi dans nos productions (manifestation linguistiques : phrases, textes). Comme ces traces constituent une forme d'extériorisation de l'organisation des idées (concepts/mots) dans notre cerveau, on peut s'en servir pour créer un modèle analogue. Ceci donnera un atlas ou une carte sémantique permettant alors aux auteurs de s'orienter pour trouver le mot qui leur fait (momentanément) défaut. Voici mon ambition. L’objectif de cet exposé est de montrer comment on pourrait construire une telle ressource et comment s'en servir.
