Restitution projet étudiant.e.s MASCO 29 janvier
2021-01-29 13:00 - 16:00 (Europe/Paris)
L’équipe de l’UE ingénierie cognitive :
L’UE ingénierie cognitive du Masco a changé de forme. Depuis la deuxième semaine de janvier, les étudiant.e.s et l’équipe du CREx travaillent sur un projet collaboratif impliquant l’analyse des tâches et l’organisation du développement d’un système. Les étudiants devront mettre en œuvre leurs connaissances sur des sujets proposés comme par exemple :
– la mesure du rythme cérébral et extractions des fréquences référencées (alpha, beta,…)
– le degrés de synchronie entre deux « inter actants » en mesurant extrayant des signaux physio (ECG, EEG)
– Une approche Art et NeuroPhysio, mesurer l’effet du rythme (stimulation visuelle ou auditive) sur les signaux physio ou au contraire « sonifier » ou visualiser les variations des signaux cérébraux et physio
– Mind control d’un mobile
– La BCI

Le 29 janvier 2021 nous organisons la restitution du travail (examen) des étudiants à la salle des voûtes (Saint Charles) de 13 h 30 à 16 h (programme : : https://filez.univ-amu.fr/q16ooumqhq). Le lien vers la retransmission de cet évènement est à la fin du mail.
Pour débuter cette séance de restitution, nous aurons le plaisir d’accueillir, en visio, Camille Jeunet qui présentera une partie de ses travaux sur l’imagerie Mentale ainsi que sur l’utilisation de la BCI (Brain Control Imagerie) associée à la réalité virtuelle. Cette présentation sera suivie de la restitution par les M2 MASCO de leur projet développé pendant l’UE Ingénieur Cogniticien. Ces projets autour de casques EEG OpenBCI ont été développés par groupe de 4 à 6 étudiant-e-s.
Participer à la réunion Zoom
https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/93929390495?pwd=[REDACTED]
ID de réunion : 939 2939 0495
Code secret : [REDACTED]

Interpreting machine learning in hearing, communication and language sciences: why, how, and the current challenges
2021-02-11 12:00 - 14:30
Here is the link to the event : https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/99484117315?pwd=[REDACTED]
“Interpreting machine learning ? Why and how ? “
In the context of a cycle of talks organized by the ILCB post-docs, we are organising February, 11th (online) a talk/round table on interpretability.

This event is dedicated to be informal and aims to be a place for discussing our point of view and/or needs on interpretability, in the context of language and hearing sciences, but not only, all contributions and points of view are very welcome.

Please find below the original call with an updated program.

Here is the link to the event : https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/99484117315?pwd=[REDACTED]

____

https://www.ilcb.fr/event/interpreting-machine-learning-in-hearing-communication-and-language-sciences-why-how-and-the-current-challenges/

Machine learning and deep neural networks have been raised as compelling models to simulate complex tasks in language, communication and brain sciences. But what do we really understand about these model and how they process information? As users, we often use them as tools without precisely understanding their mechanistic and representational underpinnings. It is now crucial to go through the interpretation of machine learning but interpreting might have different meaning: while perceptual researchers might aim to understand how a convolutional networks can be interpreted in terms of nonlinear filtering or brain activations like patterns, a language researcher might try to decipher the role and meaning of the recursive computations made by transformer networks.

The ILCB bridges research in language, communication and brain sciences all of which are susceptible of benefiting from the use of machine learning, with research in informatics and mathematics, directly concerned with machine learning as a topic in its own right.

Program :

12h/12h30 – Etienne Thoret (Post-doc ILCB, PRISM, LIS) – Deciphering the acoustical bases of hearing by interpreting biomimetic deep-neural-networks (20 min + 10 min)

12h30/13h – Philippe Blache (LPL) – Is language processing incremental? A comparison between Transformer and RNN-based language models and their ability to model human language processing. (20 min + 10 min)

13h/13h30 – Ronan Sicre (LIS) – Visual interpretability of deep neural networks: a brief overview. (20 min + 10 min)

13h30/13h45 Adrià Torrens (University of Ostrava) Building a grammar for gradient linguistic evaluative expressions: Do Machine learning, neuronal networks, and deep learning help? (10 min + 5min)

13h45/14h30 – Discussion (45 minutes)

Etienne Thoret,

Understanding the communication between the spoken and written language system from a network perspective
2021-04-08 12:00 - 13:00
Shuai Wang, Postdoc ILCB and Chotiga Pattamadilok, CNRS researcher, LPL
Abstract :
The left ventral occipitotemporal cortex, also named visual word form area, plays a key role in reading. Recent evidence suggests that it is also involved in different levels of speech processing, from phoneme analysis to sentence listening. Yet, little is known about the underlying mechanisms of this cross-modal activation and the communication between this area and the spoken language system. In this talk, we are going to introduce our on-going research that addresses these issues from a network perspective by 1) applying the Graph Theory on fMRI data, and 2) examining the temporal dynamics of the communication between areas within the spoken and written language system using an intracranial EEG protocol.

Comparing brains across individuals and species via cortical folding patterns
2021-04-22 12:00 - 14:30
KepKee and Olivier Coulon
Abstract:
A prominent feature of the human cerebral cortex is the presence of folds, or sulci. Even though cortical sulci look very different from one person to another, sulcal organisation is not at all random: it follows a topography that is highly conserved across human and nonhuman primates. Robust sulci-function relationships have mostly been demonstrated in the primary sulci (e.g. the central sulcus where the motor cortex is found), as these sulci tend to be more stable across individuals in terms of their shape, and relative positions on the cortex. In contrast, sulci-function links in secondary and tertiary sulci have been harder to study due to large inter-individual variabilities.With the advent of modern neuroimaging methods and an accumulation of MRI brain scans, it is now possible to characterize the spatial, geometric, and topological variations of cortical sulci across many individuals and species, and to study their links to brain function. This promising line of work has revealed novel relationships between sulci and functional brain areas at the individual level beyond primary sulci, that are generalised across primates. Such powerful sulci-function links provide an important means of bridging brains across individuals and species for comparisons.This seminar aims to provide an overview of :

How sulcal anatomy is important for revealing brain structure-function relationships across individuals and species, and;
The current methods and tools developed in our team for performing such sulcal analyses on MRI data.

In this seminar, we will present a series of three talks :

Talk 1: I will discuss recent evidence demonstrating that sulcal anatomy is an important means for localising functional areas across individuals and species.
Talk 2: Olivier and I will present a novel method that allows the cross-mapping of cortical surfaces across individuals, and species, based on common sulci for brain comparisons.
Talk 3: Finally, Olivier will present ongoing research about the links between the morphology of cortical folds, anatomical connectivity and function.

Video :

The Socio-Computational Architecture of Language Acquisition Framework: Linking Social Language Acquisition with Artificial Intelligence.
2021-05-07 12:00 - 13:00
Sho Tsuji (International Research Center for Neurointelligence, Univ. of Tokyo)
Theories and data on language acquisition suggest a range of cues are used, ranging from information on structure found in the linguistic signal itself, to information gleaned from the environmental context or through social interaction. We propose a blueprint for computational models of the early language learner (SCALa, for Socio-Computational Architecture of Language Acquisition) that makes explicit the connection between the kinds of information available to the social learner and the computational mechanisms required to extract language-relevant information and learn from it. SCALa integrates a range of views on language acquisition, further allowing us to make precise recommendations for future large-scale empirical research.
The zoom link:
https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/2515421853?pwd=[REDACTED]

Échanges autour de méthodes d'analyse de données conversationnelles
2021-05-11 14:00 - 17:30
Échanges autour de méthodes d’analyse de données conversationnelles
14h Abdellah Fourtassi: Using NLP as a research method to study (multimodal) interactive dynamics in early child-caregiver dialogue
15h Uwe Reichel : Prosody parameterization applied to language typology (plus hands-on ***)
16h Leonardo Lancia: Analyses of speech coordinative patterns
17h General discussion
*** The hands-on material can be downloaded here:
https://www.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/~reichelu/transfer/copasul_handson.zip
It contains a pdf which in section 3 guides through how to install the needed packages and to set up the Jupyter Notebook (tested on linux).

Participer à la réunion Zoom
https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/7589644650?pwd=[REDACTED]
ID de réunion : 758 964 4650
Code secret : tFF5ge
Next M-Converse meeting will take place early in the summer featuring: Roxane Bertrand, Magalie Ochs and Benoit Favre. Stay tuned !
You want to give a talk? Please, do get in touch with a member of the organizing team.
Céline, Daniele, Leonardo and Noël

From prelinguistic communication to word use in typically hearing and deaf infants
2021-05-21 12:00 - 13:00
Danielle Matthews (Department of psychology, The University of Sheffield)

Around the end of the first year infants make the transition from prelinguistic communication (babble, gesture, eye contact) to word use. I will present a series of studies that have 1) measured individual differences that predict this transition 2) tested experimentally if it is possible to promote learning and 3) compared deaf and hearing infants. Together these studies reveal the important role of the social environment in learning to talk.

You can import this shared google calendar to your own calendar for details about our next meetings and speakers.
The zoom link:

https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/2515421853?pwd=[REDACTED]

Linking Language evolution, language acquisition, and language diversity: How social and cognitive pressures shape learning and communication
2021-06-11 12:00 - 13:00
Limor Raviv (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics)
ABSTRACT:
What are the social, environmental, and cognitive pressures that shape the evolution of language in our species? Why are there so many different languages in the world? And how did this astonishing linguistic diversity come about?
These are some of the most interesting questions in the fields of cognitive science and linguistics, and represent the range of topics discussed in my research so far.
My work focuses on linking core aspects of language acquisition, language evolution, and language diversity using a range of novel behavioral paradigms and computational models.
My goal is to shed light on the communicative pressures and cognitive constraints (e.g., memory limitations, efficiency) that shape social interaction and language use in our species, and to identify the social, environmental, and cross-cultural factors (e.g., population size) that lead to language diversity and to cross-linguistic variation.
In this talk, I will provide an overview of my research in the past six years (including methods and results from selected projects), as well as present future directions and ongoing work.

The zoom link:

https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/2515421853?pwd=[REDACTED]

Treize Minutes
2021-06-15 20:00 - 23:30 | Espace Julien, 39 Cours Julien, Marseille, 13006, France
Petites conférences pluridisciplinaires rythmées : 6 intervenants, 13′ par orateur !
Une salle comble, des vidéos vues par des milliers d’internautes : les Treize Minutes Marseille sont de retour à l’Espace Julien pour une huitième édition de ce « butinage » intellectuel qui a fait le succès des conférences TED. Des sujets variés abordés par des intervenants d’horizons divers allant des sciences humaines et sociales aux sciences expérimentales…
Six nouveaux orateurs viendront nous faire rêver et réfléchir. Des virus masqués ? Des virus qui soignent ? Des histoires d’A ? Brousse Willis qui plante l’humanité ? Et la glottophobie ? Qu’esseu queu ça veut direu ? Prenez une comète dans la face avec Mireille Ansaldi, Adeline Duperray, Etienne Decroly, Fabrice Feinstein, Médéric Gasquet-Cyrus et Thierry Tatoni.
Entrée libre, réservation conseillée. Traduction en Langue des Signes Française sur place et en streaming. Programme, information, réservation à partir du 2 juin et streaming en direct sur : https://treize.lis-lab.fr/ .

Exploring language development in autistic and TD children: individual differences, linguistic environment and conversational dynamics
2021-06-18 13:00 - 14:00
Riccardo Fusaroli (Interacting Minds Center, Aarhus University)
Le séminaire se tiendra en visioconférence via le lien : https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/2515421853?pwd=[REDACTED]
Language development is traditionally explored in terms of individual differences and/or linguistic environment. In this talk I will present a more comprehensive framework, where children actively engage and potentially the linguistic environment, and analogously adult speakers adapt to and engage the child production. I will also present initial investigations on a longitudinal corpus involving 32 autistic and 35 typically developing children followed for over 2 years between 2 and 5 years of age. The focus will be to predict language development relying on individual differences (e.g. verbal IQ, socialization skills), linguistic environment (amount of language, lexical richness, syntactic complexity) and conversational dynamics (linguistic alignment).

Anything but boring: How looking at tasks can tell us more about language development.
2021-07-02 12:00 - 13:00
Christina Bergmann (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics)
Le séminaire se tiendra en visioconférence via le lien : https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/2515421853?pwd=[REDACTED]
Abstract: Work that focuses on how we measure children’s knowledge may seem a hurdle towards discovery. In this talk, I will argue that inspecting the methods we use can tell us a great deal about the underlying mechanisms that generate measurable behavior, and highlight how these insights are key for theory building and computational modelling.

Doc/Post Doc Day : Interdisciplinary Burst
2021-07-07 10:00 - 17:00 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
The workshop will be held at the Laboratoire Parole et Langage in Aix-en-Provence (live!).
There will also be the possibility to attend the event online at :
https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/99695801333?pwd=[REDACTED]

Registration is mandatory by the 25th of June at the link below.
Please specify next to your name if you want to attend the event online (for instance: Joseph (online)). That will allow us to get organized for lunch on site.
https://www.ilcb.fr/event/journee-des-doctorants-et-post-doctorants-2021/

The full programme below and at Journée des doctorants et post-doctorants 2021 | ILCB!
Looking forward to discussing with you!
ILCB Docs and PostDocs

Workshop on Bayesian models of cognition, language and speech
2021-07-09 09:45 - 18:00 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
In recent years, Bayesian approaches have developed at a remarkable rate in a large variety of domains, from cognitive science to machine learning, as well as speech and language sciences and neuroscience. They offer us new ways of modelling human as well as animal cognition in situations of uncertainty and in a probabilistic framework. In the field of the cognitive bases of language and speech, innovative Bayesian models have been proposed by Moulin-Frier, Diard, Schwartz & Bessière (2015) or Carr, Smith, Culbertson & Kirby (2020), among others. In July 2020, the ILCB held an online seminar on Bayesian modelling with Julien Diard and Jean-Luc Schwartz. This year’s workshop will feature presentations by Julien Diard and Jon Carr, and by PhD students Mamady Nabé, Lena Huttner and Elliot Huggett.
Program

Summer school
2021-08-30 - 2021-09-03 | CIRM – Luminy, 163 avenuede Luminy, Case 916, Marseille, 13288, France

Language development as a joint process: Why the simultaneous learning of Form, Content, and Use is more a help than a hindrance
2021-10-08 12:00 | via zoom
Abdellah Fourta (Aix-Marseille University & INRIA Paris)
Abstract:
To acquire language, children need to learn form (e.g., phonology), content (e.g., word meaning), and use (e.g., finding the right words to convey a communicative intent). The scientific study of language development has traditionally studied these dimensions separately. Indeed, one could imagine that children first acquire the form, then associate form with content, and only then, learn how to use form and content adequately in a communicative context. The reality of the situation is that children have to deal with aspects of form, content and use simultaneously and experimental studies suggest that the timeline of acquisition of these dimensions largely overlap, indicating that children learn them in parallel, not one at a time. While this fact makes language acquisition seem even harder than we previously thought, here I argue that the joint learning of form, content, and use may be more a help than a hindrance, as these dimensions are interdependent in many ways and can therefore constrain/disambiguate each other. I will illustrate this idea based on my previous and current research combining both experimental and computational modeling.
Where: Zoom (send us an email to receive the link)

CoCoDev
2021-10-22 10:30 - 12:00 | via zoom
Kevin El Haddad is a researcher in affective computing and Human-Agent interaction at the University of Mons.
Abstract:
Smiles and laughs (S&L) are among the most frequent and informative non-verbal expressions used in our daily interactions. Their incorporation into machine’s communication skills is therefore a must in order to improve human-agent interaction (HAI) applications quality (among other aspects), whether it is on the detection/perception side or on the generation/production side.
This presentation will focus on our efforts aiming at providing a better understanding of S&L conversational dynamics as well as implementing them in HAI modules. We will present our contributions and ongoing work in synthesis, recognition and prediction technologies as well as resources we propose to the community with the hope that this same community will help us improve them through collaboration or other contributions.
I strongly believe that, with the limited resources available in the scientific communities, the more people get involved, the more we can accelerate the integration of S&L, and by extension nonverbal expressions in general, in HAI applications. So I look forward to meeting you during this talk.
—

The zoom link: https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/2515421853

Evelina Fedorenko
2021-10-22 15:00 - 18:00 | via zoom
Le séminaire se tiendra en visioconférence via le lien : https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/91316230672
Code secret : [REDACTED]
The first lunch talk of the year will take place on 22 October from 3 to 4.30 pm and it will be in visio.
We will have the pleasure to listen to Evelina Fedorenko . You will find below the summary of her speech and the zoom link to connect.

The language system in the human brain.

The goal of my research program is to understand the representations and computations that enable us to share complex thoughts with one another via language, and their neural implementation. A decade ago, I developed a robust new approach to the study of language in the brain based on identifying language-responsive cortex functionally in individual participants. Originally developed for fMRI, we have since extended this approach to other modalities, like intracranial recordings. Using this functional-localization approach, I identified and characterized a set of frontal and temporal brain areas that i) support language comprehension and production (spoken and written); ii) are robustly separable from the lower-level perceptual (e.g., speech processing) and motor (e.g., articulation) brain areas; iii) are spatially and functionally similar across diverse languages (>40 languages from 11 language families); and iv) form a functionally integrated system with substantial redundancy across different components. In this talk, I will highlight a few discoveries from the last decade and argue that the primary goal of language is efficient information transfer rather than enabling complex thought, as has been argued in one prominent philosophical and linguistic tradition (e.g., Wittgenstein, 1921; Berwick & Chomsky, 2016). I will use two kinds of evidence to make this argument. First, I will examine the relationship between language and other aspects of cognition, including social cognitive abilities and complex thought/reasoning. I will show that the language brain regions are highly selective for language over diverse non-linguistic processes while also showing a deep and intriguing link with a system that supports social cognition. And second, I will examine different properties of language and argue that language both has a) properties that make it well-suited for communication, and b) properties that make it not suitable for complex thought. Both of these lines of evidence support the communicative function of language, and suggest that the idea that language evolved to allow for more complexity in thought is unlikely.

Participer à la réunion Zoom
https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/91316230672

ID de réunion : 913 1623 0672
Code secret : [REDACTED]
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Temporal niches in auditory communication
2021-10-29 12:00 - 17:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Luc. H Arnal and Keith B. Doelling, Institut de l’Audition, Centre Pasteur, Paris XII.
Communication signals such as speech or music, are complex signals that exploit acoustic features in a wide array of timescales. The auditory system responds differently to each timescale creating opportunity for sound designers, composers and human talkers to exploit these temporal niches to manipulate listeners’ affective states and reactions. Exploring human perception and reactions to a wide range of time scales (from a few to hundreds of milli-seconds) we will show that fast (>30 Hz) and slow (<10 Hz) temporal regularities are processed in a very different manner by the human brain and rely on distinct neural mechanisms. On the one hand, stimuli with high frequency dynamics – such as alarm signals – temporally overload the auditory system to induce aversive percepts, arguably by driving the sustained propagation of information in a bottom-up manner. On the other hand, slower stimuli – as featured in musical rhythms – permit the development of anticipatory processes, relying on slower, top-down oscillatory mechanisms. By analyzing the temporal dynamics in the acoustics of signals with different communicative goals (alarm, music) and their impact on the human brain, we identify and characterize specific neural systems and mechanisms shaping the diversity of auditory communication niches in the temporal domain.

CoCoDev
2021-11-05 16:00 - 17:00 | via zoom
Production practice is more effective than comprehension for second language learning
Elise Hopman (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Abstract:
Whereas most classroom-based language instruction traditionally emphasizes comprehension-based learning, memory research suggests that language production activities may provide a stronger learning experience than comprehension practice, due to the meaningfully different task demands involved in producing versus comprehending language. Using both artificial and natural language learning experiments with adults, I show that production exercises are more effective than comprehension exercises for learning the vocabulary and grammar of a foreign language. I will discuss these findings in the broader context of research implying that production and production-like activities might play a privileged role during learning more generally.

CoCoDev
2021-11-12 16:00 - 17:00 | via zoom
BabyBERTa: Learning More Grammar With Small-Scale Child-Directed Language
Philip Huebner (University of Illinos, Urbana-Champaign)
Abstract:
Transformer-based language models have taken the NLP world by storm. However, their potential for addressing important questions in language acquisition research has been largely ignored. In this work, we examined the grammatical knowledge of RoBERTa (Liu et al., 2019) when trained on a 5M word corpus of language acquisition data to simulate the input available to children between the ages 1 and 6. Using the behavioral probing paradigm, we found that a smaller version of RoBERTa-base that never predicts unmasked tokens, which we term BabyBERTa, acquires grammatical knowledge comparable to that of pre-trained RoBERTa-base – and does so with approximately 15X fewer parameters and 6,000X fewer words. We discuss implications for building more efficient models and the learnability of grammar from input available to children. Lastly, to support research on this front, we release our novel grammar test suite that is compatible with the small vocabulary of child-directed input.

Computational study of active and interactive word learning
2021-11-19 12:00 - 14:00 | via zoom
Lieke Gelderloos, a Ph.D. researcher at Tilburg University, whose work is at the intersection of cognitive science, linguistics, and artificial intelligence

The zoom link: https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/2515421853

Abstract: Models of cross-situational word learning typically characterize the learner as a passive observer. However, a language learning child can actively participate in verbal and non-verbal communication. We present a computational model that learns to map words to objects in images through word comprehension and production. The productive and receptive parts of the model can operate independently, but can also feed into each other. This introspective quality enables the model to learn through self-supervision, and also to estimate its own word knowledge, select optimal input, and thereby alter its own learning trajectory. The modular set-up is also suitable for testing effects of communicative feedback. In this talk, I will cover our findings regarding active selection of input, and present preliminary results on tests with communicative feedback.

Aurélie Bidet-Caulet
2021-11-26 12:00 - 14:30 | FRUMAM, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
How does the human brain resist auditory distraction?
One main challenge for the attentive brain is to resist distracting information. Auditory distraction can result from predictable irrelevant information (e.g. ongoing background noise) or from unexpected, transient and salient distracting events (e.g. phone ring, fire alarm…). Using intracranial EEG, scalp EEG and MEG data combined with behavioral measures, we have investigated brain activities in the time and frequency domains to characterize the brain mechanisms involved in shielding from distraction, in the healthy, developing (children and ageing data), or dysfunctional (stroke or migraine patients) brain. I will present a first set of data showing that distinct inhibitory and facilitatory mechanisms support selective attention to reduce the impact of an irrelevant sound stream. Then, I will present data showing that the impact of an unexpected salient environmental sound results from a balance between top-down and bottom-up mechanisms of attention.

CoCoDev
2021-12-03 12:00 - 14:00 | via zoom
TBA

Okko Räsänen (Tampere University)

TBA
2021-12-17 12:00 - 14:00 | via zoom
Jonathan Ginzburg (Université de Paris)

Language embodiment and relativity: Evidence in Chinese-English bilinguals
2022-01-14 12:00 - 15:00 | via zoom
Guillaume Thierry
Bangor University, Bangor, UK

As soon as we master a language, several of our cognitive abilities that do not readily require language to operate and are seemingly independent from it interact with language representations in a highly sophisticated fashion, reflecting the highly integrated nature of human cognition. Examples of such cognitive abilities are perception, attention, affective regulation, memory, reasoning, and decision making. Although it is intuitive that such cognitive functions continuously interact with language in many ways, there is a paucity of data regarding the nature of such interactions. The quest for data shedding light on these interactions is difficult, however, and experimental paradigms used in the past are often criticised due to insufficiently controlled materials and experimental tasks. For instance, language-based studies involving overt reports and questionnaires often fail to acknowledge that they cannot test cognitive effects beyond the realm of language, since all proceedings are language-mediated. Behavioural studies also regularly fail to establish the level of awareness involved in tasks which could strategically, and therefore artificially, involve language on a metacognitive level. Here, I will present data from a set of studies showcasing the intricate nature of language-cognition interaction in the human brain, and particularly that of bilingual individuals who have come to master a second language in life. I will show how some language representations acquired early in life (i.e., from the native language) are there for life, influencing human cognition in a wholly unconscious manner. I will also show how new representations acquired later in life (i.e., from a second language) compete with native language representations and influence cognition unconsciously and ubiquitously. In closing, I will attempt to assess the repercussions of our observations for linguistic relativity and embodied cognition theory.

TBA
2022-01-28 12:00 - 14:00 | via zoom
Asli Ozyurek (Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior)

Teaching an old word new tricks? Phonological updates in the bilingual mental lexicon
2022-02-04 12:00 - 15:00 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Isabelle Darcy
Indiana University / ILCB / IMéRA
Listening to speech in your native language is easy. Recognizing the words spoken in conversation is generally an automatic and smooth everyday process in the first language (L1). Even in noisy or otherwise less than ideal conditions, performance is surprisingly robust. But anyone who has attempted to follow a conversation in a second language (L2) knows how demanding this can be, even when you know all the words. Even for reasonably clear speech, identifying individual words out of the speech stream is difficult. Charles and Trenkic (2015) reported that international university students missed about 30% of the words they heard during lectures.
For bilinguals, the perceptual processing of L2 speech sounds and the stored representations of the words themselves are influenced by the L1. For example, two words such as “lake” and “rake” may sound the same and may be stored as one word (= one homophonous pronunciation /leik/ for two concepts) for Japanese learners of English, because the /r/-/l/ distinction is difficult to perceive and represent for them due to the lack of this distinction in their L1. One consequence of these effects is the difficulty to know which word to activate when hearing /leik/, but also the difficulty to learn to pronounce the words differently.
Yet, many questions remain as to how bilinguals store the phonological form of words (their pronunciation) in the corresponding lexical entry in long-term memory, and how these representations change over time. Our lab has obtained evidence for dissociations between perception and lexical storage, which suggest that even after perception of a difficult phonological dimension improves, modifying lexical representations that use this phonological dimension remains hard. This means that even after a Japanese learner learns to distinguish /r/ from /l/, their representations of the words might still be the same.
In this talk I will outline research conducted in my lab to understand the phonological structure of the bilingual mental lexicon, how words are stored, and whether (and how) bilinguals are able to update previously inaccurate lexical representations.

A holistic measure of inter-annotation agreement with continuous data
2022-02-21 12:00 - 13:30 | via zoom
Rachid Riad (École Normale Supérieure – Inria – Inserm)
Abstract: Inter-rater reliability/agreement measures the degree of agreement among raters to describe, code or assess the same phenomenon. Most coefficients (ex: α, κ) measuring these agreements in psychology and natural sciences focus on the categorization of events. Yet, the annotations of speech and especially conversational spontaneous speech represent a complex continuous phenomenon to annotate. There is not only categorization but also the localization of events that is asked from annotators, referred to as unitizing. In this presentation, we will describe the gamma agreement γ introduced by Mathet et al. 2015 and our work to extend this measure with the python package ‘pygamma-agreement’. We illustrate the use of this measure with corpora coming from (1) daylong recordings to study language acquisition, and (2) interviews at the hospital to study speech pathologies.
Where: Zoom link https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/2515421853

Multimodality as a design feature of language: Implications for language structure, processing and acquisition
2022-02-28 12:00 - 13:30 | via zoom
Asli Ozyurek (Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior)
Abstract: TBA
Where: Zoom link https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/2515421853

JOURNEE ILCB
2022-03-11 | Grand amphi, Campus St-Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13003, France
JOURNEE ILCB
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9h30 Conférence Plénière Ghislaine DEHAENE-LAMBERTZ, Directrice de Recherche CNRS, Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, CEA, Paris
“Are human infants able to use symbols?”

Summary :
Human adults commonly use symbolic systems (e.g. speech, numbers, writing code, algebraic formula) to represent aspects of the external world, and they easily and flexibly go from symbols to objects and vice-versa. This “symbolic mind” might be related to a distinct human neural architecture, in particular, the expansion of the associative areas and the development of new long-distance fiber tracts, such as the arcuate fasciculus. More efficient connections to and from the frontal lobe and a longer memory buffer may lead to the discovery of more abstract structures, and ultimately enable to represent the external world with a symbolic system.
This neural architecture is in place at full-term birth and brain imaging studies have revealed that higher-level associative regions, such as frontal areas, are involved in infant’s cognition from start. We may thus expect that infants might share the same symbolic competence than adults. To support this claim, I will present brain imaging data showing the infants’ structural and functional brain architecture but also behavioral and ERP data revealing symbolic and logical computation in young infants.

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10h30 Soutenance HDR, Kristof STRIJKERS, Chargé de Recherche CNRS, Laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-en-Pr.
“Towards an Integrated Brain Language Model — The spatiotemporal dynamics of production versus perception”

Committee :
Sonja KOTZ, Maastricht University (rapporteure)
Benjamin MORILLON, Aix-Marseille Université (rapporteur)
Noël NGUYEN, Aix-Marseille Université (tuteur)
Martin PICKERING, Edinburgh University (rapporteur)
Rasha ABDEL RAHMAN, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (examinatrice)
Summary :
The capacity of communicating through language has been instrumental in the evolution of our species. Being able to quickly alert our peers of an upcoming danger has high biological relevance, and the ease and speed with which we can use language has made this our primary communicative tool. Not surprisingly, understanding the fundaments of this ability has been a central issue throughout the history of human and social sciences. By now, our knowledge about the representations and processes underpinning language behaviour is impressive and thanks to the combined efforts of linguists, psychologists and neuroscientists, detailed neurolinguistic models of language production and perception have been developed. Despite the huge advances made to understand this complex capacity of the human mind, language research has been typically modality-specific, with a dissociation between production and comprehension in terms of research strategies, paradigms and models. The objective of the research I present here for my HDR project is to explore the nature of linguistic representations and processes from an integrated perspective. This is important, because in order to fully understand language processing and develop a neurolinguistic model that explains behavior, we’ll need to understand how production and perception interact. This HDR aims at contributing to this endeavor by comparing the spatiotemporal dynamics of production and perception for the basic building blocks of language: words. In doing so, I want to address the question of whether and how word representations and their processing overlap in time and space in the speaker and listener’s minds.

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13h BUFFET ILCB
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14h30 Soutenance HDR Adrien MEGUERDITCHIAN, Chargé de recherche CNRS, Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive, Marseille
“On the gestural origins of language : What baboons’ gestures and brain asymmetry could tell us”

Committee :
Pascal BELIN, Institut de Neurosciences de la Timone, CNRS, Aix-Marseille Univ (rapporteur)
Emmanuel MELLET, Institut des Maladies Neurodégénératives, CEA, CNRS, Bordeaux Univ (rapporteur)
Martine MEUNIER, Centre de Recherche en Neurosciences de Lyon, INSERM, CNRS (rapporteuse)
Ghislaine DEHAENE-LAMBERTZ, Neuroimagerie Cognitive, INSERM, CEA, Univ Paris-Saclay (examinatrice)
Marieke LONGCAMP, Laboratoire de Neuroscience Cognitive, CNRS, Aix-Marseille Univ (tutrice)
Agnès TREBUCHON, Institut des Neurosciences et des Systèmes, AP-HM, Aix-Marseille Univ (invitée)
Jacques VAUCLAIR, Centre PsyCLE, Aix-Marseille Univ (invité)

Summary :
Nonhuman primates mostly communicate not only with a rich vocal repertoire but also with manual and body gestures. In contrast to great apes, this latter communicative gestural system has been poorly investigated in monkeys. In the last 15 years, the gestural research we conducted in the baboons Papio anubis, an Old World monkey species, have shown potential direct evolutionary continuities with some key properties of language such as intentionality, referentiality, learning flexibility as well as its underlying lateralization and hemispheric specialization of the brain. According to these collective findings, which are congruent with the ones reported in great apes, it is thus not excluded that features of gestural communication shared between humans, great apes and baboons, may have played a critical role in the phylogenetic roots of language and dated back, not to the Hominidae evolution, but rather to their much older Catarrhine common ancestor 25-40 million years ago.

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17h APERO
