ILCB

Workshop sur le jeu
2023-01-23 09:30 - 2023-01-24 17:30 (Europe/Paris)
Evénement organisé par les étudiants de Master de Sciences cognitives sur le thème du jeu
Lundi 23 janvier
9h30 -10h30 Elisabeta Palagi (Primatologie, Università di Pisa)
10h30-11h00 Pause Café
11h00-12h00 Laurent Perrinet (Neurosciences Computationnelles, CNRS – Aix-Marseille Université)
12h00-13h00 Thierry Chaminade (Neurosciences Cognitives,CNRS, Aix-Marseille,)
Déjeuner
14h00-15h00 Gilles Brougère (Sciences de l’Education,Université Paris 13, EXPERICE)
15h00-16h00 Swann pichon (Department of Psychology at the University of Geneva)
16h00-16h30 Pause Café
16h30- 17h30 Table Ronde

Mardi 24 janvier
9h30-10h30 Laurent Sébastien Fournier (Anthropologie,Université cote d’Azur, IDEMEC)
10h30-11h00 Pause Café
11h00-12h00 Beatrice Alescio (Psychologie, Université Aix-Marseille, LNC)
12h00-13h00 Grégoire Borst (Psychologie du développement, Université Paris-Descartes
13h00-16h30 Buffet- Démonstrations- Atelier
Centre de Réalité Virtuelle de la Méditerranée ; ExoStim ; NatulPad ; PlayTime ; Terre Ludique ; ABFC Consulting Formation ; The Magic Box

Stimulating speech: auditory-motor interactions in perception and production
2023-02-03 12:00 - 13:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Kate WATKINS Professeure à l’Université d’Oxford
I will describe a series of experiments employing non-invasive brain stimulation in combination with measures of brain function, which explore how motor-to-sensory and sensory-to-motor interactions can be modulated during speech perception and production tasks.
To study the role of the motor cortex in speech perception, we use transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to temporarily disrupt the motor cortex representations of the articulators. We then record the effects of this disruption on speech perception using behaviour, EEG and MEG. We found that the motor cortex contributes to early stages of speech processing in the auditory cortex but not to processing of non-speech stimuli. The early effects are left-lateralised and can be fine-tuned by attention. We recently explored these lateralised effects further using perception of lexical tones in Mandarin and non-tonal language speakers. The effect of speech motor cortex disruption is left-lateralised for tone perception in Mandarin speakers and right-lateralised for non-tonal language speakers.
We have also explored the effects of anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over speech motor cortex and the cerebellum on speech adaptation to a formant perturbation suggesting different contributions from these regions to the adaptation process.
Taken together our work demonstrates the strength of brain stimulation methods especially when used in combination with other measures. The work presented confirms the importance of interactions between motor and sensory systems that are necessary for both speech perception and production.

AFFECTIVE FACTORS AND EMOTIONS IN SECOND LANGUAGE EDUCATION
2023-03-02 10:30 - 12:00 | Campus Saint-Jérome, 52 Av. Escadrille Normandie Niemen, Marseille, 13013, France
Dr. Mª del Carmen FONSECA MORA : Professor of Applied linguistics and language teacher training, Affective Language Learning Lab, University of Huelva, Spain
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Neural dynamics of feedforward and feedback speech processing
2023-03-10 12:00 - 13:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Adeen Flinker, PhD, New York University, Grossman School of Medicine, Tandon School of Engineering
Speech production is a complex human function requiring continuous feedforward commands together with reafferent feedback processing. The cortical organization of these processes are largely characterized by dual stream models of speech (Hickok & Poeppel 2007, Rauschecker & Scott 2009), wherein Frontal cortex mainly serves as an articulatory network mapping feedforward commands. Leveraging human intracranial recordings, I will present a series of studies addressing the role of prefrontal cortex in processing feedforward and feedback speech commands in support of a mixed representation across frontal cortex. I will argue for a functional subdivision of precentral gyrus wherein the ventral division sends feedforward commands and serves as the source of a corollary discharge, while the dorsal division carries out auditory feedback processing of reafferent speech.

Timing, action, and language
2023-03-24 | IMéRA
Timing is essential for the smooth coordination of neural and motor processes involved in action execution. The brain’s ability to time actions is related to the integration of information across sensory modalities and involves generation of predictive signals to anticipate future events. Timing ability is essential for successful performance of movements in music, and dance, and for speech production and perception. Intelligible speech requires precise timing of movements of the articulators. In addition, the perception of timing cues in speech provides important information about meaning in language comprehension. Understanding the role of timing in action and language production and perception can provide us with a better understanding of the brain processes involved, how the brain integrates information across sensory and motor domains and, ultimately, may inform interventions aimed at improving performance across a range of contexts and in disorders.
To conclude Kate Watkin’s research project and resrearch residency at Iméra, the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) of AIx-Marseille University, Marie-Helene Grosbras, Jenny Coull and Kate Watkins are organising a workshop on the 24th March at Iméra to discuss the role of timing in the guidance of actions generally and in speech and language more specifically. The aim is to bring together local researchers who are tackling these topics from different perspectives, in the hope of fostering closer collaboration and developing innovative lines of research.
We are inviting 30 minute presentations from members of the Aix-Marseille community who are working on at least 2 of these 3 topics i.e. timing and action / time & language / action & language. If you are interested in presenting and/or attending please contact us by e-mail at kate.watkins@psy.ox.ac.uk. Lunch will be provided for confirmed participants.

Kate Watkins is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, Dept. of Experimental Psychology and Tutorial Fellow in Psychology, St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. She is a resident research Fellow at Iméra and Holder of the ILCB / Iméra chair.

Multimodality in social interaction
2023-04-03 09:00 - 2023-04-04 18:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
The goal of this meeting is to bring together researchers at various levels of their careers (PhD, postdoc, PIs) to engage in a two day interactive sessions on various theoretical and methodological problems confronted in the field of communication and social interactions in humans and nonhumans. What are the basic signals used in communication? How do signals interact with one another? When do signal combinations become multimodal or multicomponent? How do exchanges of such signals shape our social interactions? How do we (learn to) behaviourally coordinate such communicative exchanges? Is this coordination reflected upon intra- and inter-personal physiological as well as neurological measures? What are the challenges in collecting and annotating such data? How do we combine various methodologies and technologies (behavioural, neural, linguistic) to answer our questions? Bringing together a group of researchers from interdisciplinary backgrounds, who regularly deal with these challenges, we intend to create a shared space for interactive discussions leading us to finding solutions to our individual problems with the force of collective efforts.
We propose a two-day program including several talks as well as a comprehensive workshop to address these issues.
for more information

Treize Minutes Marseille
2023-04-04 17:00 - 20:30
Programme (https://treize.lis-lab.fr/).
Devenues un rendez-vous incontournable de la #culture scientifique à Marseille et dans la région, cet événement met en lumières les #conférences, nerveuses, variées, inattendues, présentées par des chercheurs et des chercheuses d’Aix-Marseille Université de toutes disciplines !
Le principe est simple : 6 interventions de 13 minutes chacune, suivies d’un échange de 13 minutes avec le public !
+ d’infos : https://url.univ-amu.fr/13-minutes-marseille-2023
Les petites capsules vidéo des intervenants 2023: https://vimeo.com/showcase/10235761

Journées de l’ILCB à Porquerolles
2023-04-11 08:00 - 2023-04-13 18:30
RETRAITE-ILCB-23-3

Apprentissage lexical chez les enfants en maternelle et en élémentaire: mécanismes en jeu et efficacité des méthodes d'interventions en classe
2023-05-03 10:00 - 11:00 | SALLE 9-051, Université Aix-Marseille Campus St Charles 3 Pl. Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13003, France
Intervenante : Séverine Casalis, SCALab, Univ Lille & CNRS (pour plus d’infos : https://pro.univ-lille.fr/severine-casalis)
Abstract
L’objectif de l’exposé est de présenter de façon parallèle une synthèse de modèles et travaux expérimentaux conduits sur l’apprentissage lexical d’une part et d’études interventionnelles conduites en classe d’autre part. L’apprentissage de mots est conçu, théoriquement, de façon sensiblement différente, chez les très jeunes et jeunes enfants et chez les enfants d’âge maternelle. En conséquence, nous présenterons successivement les modèles de « fast mapping » (Chiat, 2001) rendant compte de l’apprentissage lexical chez le très jeune enfant et le modèle « Complementary System Account » (Lindsay & Gaskell, 2010) qui rend compte des mécanismes d’apprentissage lexical chez l’adulte et l’enfant plus âgé. Cette distinction entre mécanismes d’apprentissage lexical selon l’âge de l’enfant est également justifiée par le rôle que joue l’orthographe dans le développement du lexique, à la fois en termes de configuration lexicale et de type d’exposition. L’apprentissage de la lecture, avec notamment l’impact de l’orthographe et l’exposition aux textes écrits modifie également les interventions réalisées en classe, souvent basées sur les textes écrits à partir du cycle 3. Cette synthèse se conclura par les perspectives de recherche ouvertes par l’articulation entre les travaux de fondamentaux et les interventions en classe.
Participer par Zoom
https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/85283430679?pwd=[REDACTED]
ID de réunion : 852 8343 0679
Code secret : [REDACTED]

Voices in the head: diversity of endophasia framed in a neurocognitive model
2023-05-05 12:00 - 13:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Hélène LOEVENBRUCK : Directrice de Recherche à l’Université Grenoble Alpes
“I am not a man, I am Cantona.”
“I love football.”
As you silently read these quotes, can you hear Eric Cantona’s voice? Can you imagine his next sentence?
Inner speech, or endophasia, can take various formats depending on the individual or the situation. It can feel expanded, like a little voice in the head, or rather condensed. It can occur as a monologue or a dialogue. It can seem intentional or irruptive. Recent data on atypical covert verbal forms, such as auditory verbal aphantasia (reported lack of inner voice), verbal hyperphantasia (reported vivid inner voice), and auditory verbal hallucination, challenge theories that postulate a universal quality of endophasia. In ConDialInt, a neurocognitive model rooted in a predictive control theory, such forms can be accounted for by considering a gradual variation along three essential dimensions: condensation, dialogality and intentionality. The inner voice phenomenon is seen as an exaptation of the sensory predictions involved in the control of overt speech. Speech production is considered to be hierarchically controlled, from conceptualisation to articulation, via formulation, motor planning and programming. At each level, control is based on the comparison between initial input and prediction. Endophasia is viewed as an interruption in the speech production process. Condensed forms emerge when the interruption occurs early, before the formulation stage. Expanded forms, inner voices, recruit the full production process, interrupted only prior to articulation. Dialogal forms are taken to include indexical and perspective properties. Intentional forms are seen as rigorously monitored predictions, whereas unintentional forms are loosely monitored. Agency feeling is assumed to rely on the timing of initial and predicted signals. The ConDialInt model is compatible with neuroanatomical data obtained for a variety of inner speech situations. It also accounts for atypical endophasia. Verbal hyperphantasia vs aphantasia are explained by variation in the condensation dimension. Auditory verbal hallucinations are construed as unintentional dialogal endophasia bestowed with a lack of agency. These propositions have implications for levels of representation in theories of language processing and cognition in general.

Here the zoom link : https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/87516300272?pwd=[REDACTED]
ID de réunion : 875 1630 0272
Code secret : [REDACTED]

Why we should care about the dorso-medial prefrontal cortex in language production
2023-06-02 11:00 - 17:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Stephanie Ries
Associate Professor, San Diego State University

The dorso-medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), including the supplementary and pre-supplementary motor areas as well as the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, has been a region of interest in studies of cognitive control and other areas of neuroscience for many years. Yet, traditional models of language production do not typically include this brain region, and its potential role in language and speech production has therefore only been more recently investigated. In this talk, I will review evidence from several research groups (including but not limited to my own) using fMRI, brain stimulation, and scalp and intracranial EEG in “monolinguals” and bilinguals with and without neurological damage that suggest that the dmPFC may play a bigger role than we previously had thought in language production. In particular, it seems likely involved in a response selection mechanism potentially taking place separately from lexical selection, in addition to speech monitoring. The implications of these findings for traditional cognitive models of language production will be discussed.

https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/83037452791?pwd=[REDACTED]
ID de réunion : 830 3745 2791
Code secret : [REDACTED]

Word learning in honor of Lila Gleitman: Perception of structure from language and world
2023-06-09 09:00 - 11:00 | Salle 9-050, Université Aix-Marseille Campus St Charles 3 Pl. Victor Hugo, Marseille, France
John Trueswell (Dept of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania)
Abstract: It is tempting to conclude that children learn the meanings of words by observing their circumstances of use (e.g., observing that the word “dog” often co-occurs with dog-sightings). If this is the case though, how do children ever learn the vast majority of the words that they know? Consider most of the words in this abstract, many of which a 3-year-old produces and understands: like “what”, “not”, “language”, “do”, “think”, “learn.” Can these words be learned by observation of their circumstances of use? There are no what-sightings that go with “what”, and no not-sightings that go with “not”; thinking-sightings often look like sleeping-sightings and sitting-sightings. How do children go about learning these “hard words” despite no explicit instruction? I will present research, some of which was done with my longtime collaborator Lila Gleitman, that is designed to answer these questions. I’ll focus on the unexpected role that word-to-world pairings nevertheless play in the learning of hard words. I’ll propose a framework for word-to-world mapping in which perception of the referent world itself offers us significant structure, and the syntactic structure we gather from the language is connected to these representations. This connection, and the structural representations on both sides of the word-to-world coin, allow us to see what we shouldn’t be able to see, and hear what we shouldn’t be able to hear. I’ll offer experimental evidence that our perception of the world includes rapid extraction of event structure, and hypothesize that this allows access to abstract relational meaning even in young children. These representations play an important role in understanding how situational contexts permit children to learn even the most abstract of terms, such as symmetrical predicates (e.g., the meaning of “equal”) and truth-functional negation (e.g., the meaning of “not”).

Interactive Robot Learning
2023-06-21 14:00 - 15:00 | FRUMAM, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Summary: In this talk, we focus on main methods and models enabling humans to teach embodied social agents such as social robots, using natural interaction. Humans guide the learning process of such agents by providing various teaching signals, which could take the form of feedback, demonstrations and instructions. This overview describes how human teaching strategies are incorporated within machine learning models. We detail the approaches by providing definitions, technical descriptions, examples and discussions on limitations. We also address natural human biases during teaching. We then present applications such as interactive task learning, robot behavior learning and socially assistive robotics. Finally, we discuss research opportunities and challenges of interactive robot learning.
Bio: Prof. Mohamed Chetouani is currently a Full Professor in signal processing and machine learning for human-machine interaction. He is affiliated to the PIRoS (Perception, Interaction et Robotique Sociales) research team at the Institute for Intelligent Systems and Robotics (CNRS UMR 7222), Sorbonne University (formerly Pierre and Marie Curie University). His activities cover social signal processing, social robotics and interactive machine learning with applications in psychiatry, psychology, social neuroscience and education. He was the coordinator of the ANIMATAS H2020 Marie Sklodowska Curie European Training Network (2018-2022). Since 2019, he is the President of the Sorbonne University Ethics Committee. He was involved in several educational activities including organization of summer schools. He is member of the EU Network of Human-Centered AI. He is General Chair of ACM ICMI 2023. He is in charge of the inclusion of Students with Disabilities for the Faculty of Science and Engineering of Sorbonne University.

Rob Hartsuiker
2023-07-10 11:00 - 12:00 | B011 LPL, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Titre à préciser

(Mis) alignment in alignment research :
2023-07-13 08:00 - 17:00

COBRA
2023-07-13 08:00 - 17:00

École d'été
2023-08-28 08:00 - 2023-09-01 17:00 | CIRM – Luminy, 163 avenuede Luminy, Case 916, Marseille, 13288, France
École d’été

Journée ILCB
2023-09-22 | B011 LPL, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
CLAIRE KABDEBON
Title: The origins of human cognition: insights from the infant brain
Abstract: Our human-unique cognitive abilities to process speech, compose music or write fictions do not suddenly emerge in adulthood, but are rather deeply rooted in early development. A major discovery of the past decades is that infants come into the world equipped with a set of initial competencies coupled with powerful learning mechanisms that pave the way for later high-level cognitive achievements. However, the exact nature of this initial knowledge and learning algorithms remains largely unknown. In this talk, I will present some of my work that aims at leveraging the development of non-invasive neuroimaging techniques and signal processing tools to reveal these early abilities: from early auditory processing to the beginnings of language acquisition.

Passerelles entre gestes et voix chez différentes espèces de primates (dont humain) : Approche comparative de la communication sensible à l’attention
2023-09-29 10:00 - 11:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Marie Bourjade
Laboratoire CLLE, Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès & Institut Universitaire de France

Bien avant l’entrée dans la parole, le jeune enfant mobilise déjà des compétences pragmatiques lui permettant de se faire comprendre, d’agir sur les adultes environnants et d’utiliser intentionnellement ses comportements à des fins communicationnelles. Parmi ces compétences pragmatiques, la Communication Sensible à l’Attention réfère à la capacité d’ajuster la modalité sensorielle des signaux communicatifs à l’attention de l’entourage. Elle revêt une importance particulière sur le plan de l’acquisition du langage, mais également de son évolution. En effet, le partage attentionnel entre parent et enfant pourrait avoir joué un rôle clé dans l’émergence de la communication sensible à l’attention chez les primates, constituant de facto une passerelle entre geste et voix. Je présenterai des travaux comparatifs réalisés en conditions écologiques chez le chimpanzé, le babouin olive et plusieurs groupes de population humaine, tous portant sur le choix des modalités de communication du jeune enfant envers sa mère selon l’état attentionnel de cette dernière. Les résultats mettront en avant les acquisitions du jeune en fonction de l’étayage maternel et souligneront l’importance fondamentale des interactions précoces dans les processus de socialisation et de développement communicationnel. Ces travaux seront remis en perspective avec les modèles culturels de parentalité et les hypothèses évolutives sur le conflit attentionnel parent-enfant.

The cerebellum in language and cognition
2023-10-17 12:30 - 13:30 | B011 LPL, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Anila D’Mello : l’Université de Texas

The cerebellum contains over 80% of the neurons in the brain, and over 50% of the neurons in the central nervous system. Despite being historically considered a motor structure, clinical and neuroimaging work find that the cerebellum is also important for cognition. This talk will present research integrating human neuroimaging, behavior, and neuromodulation to understand cerebellar contributions to higher-order language, social communication, and cognitive control in both neurotypical and autistic individuals.

(Mis)alignment in alignment research
2023-10-19 - 2023-10-20 | B011 LPL, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
(Mis)alignment workshop

14th annual scientific day of the MRI-INT Center
2023-10-20
The MRI-INT Center in Marseille is organising its 14th annual scientific day on Friday, October 20 at Cerimed, on the medical school campus of La Timone, Marseille.
This year’s theme is ‘Neuroimaging beyond the cortex’ and will be an awesome opportunity to discover various aspects of imaging the cerebellum, the basal ganglia, and the spinal cord. It will feature talks by international, national, and local experts in the field.
It will also be an opportunity for local postdocs and students to present their MRI neuroimaging work in a poster session, whatever the brain region of interest.
You can access the program here : https://irmf.int.univ-amu.fr/en/annual-meetings/
Registration if free but mandatory : https://14th-day-mri-int.sciencesconf.org/
If you are interested, please register as soon as possible : the number of places is limited.
We are looking forward to you participation to this event !
The organizers : Elin Runnqvist, Olivier Coulon, Jean-Luc Anton, Marie-Hélène Grosbras

Annulé
2023-10-27 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Prediction in Language Processing: Some Ideas About How It’s Done
Tamara Swaab, Ph.D.
Editor-in-Chief: Cognition
Professor, Department of Psychology and
Center for Mind and Brain
University of California, Davis
Title of Talk: Prediction in Language Processing: Some Ideas About How It’s Done.
Rooted in century old ideas of Kant, recent theories of perception, cognition, language, and neuroscience propose that active generation of top-down predictions of imminent sensory input guide our perceptual experiences. These predictions can be based on long-term knowledge representations stored in memory, experience based probabilistic constraints and immediate contextual constraints. Several prominent contemporary approaches to language interpretation assign significant impact to predictive processing during language interpretation. According to these accounts, comprehenders engage in a set of processes by which they can predict and pre-activate imminent bits of the linguistic input. Some models suggest that predictive processing during language comprehension happens reflexively and under all circumstances. I will present the results of a series of studies from our lab that suggest that comprehenders do not automatically and uniformly predict, but instead flexibly adapt predictive processing depending on its utility in a given processing environment.

Word learning in toddlerhood: The role of linguistic and social cues in naturalistic learning scenarios
2023-11-02 11:00 - 12:00 | LIS, 52 Av. Escadrille Normandie Niemen, Marseille, 13397, France
Monica Barbir, a researcher at the University of Tokyo

in a hybrid mode in LIS (Luminy) and online via Zoom at:
https://univ-amu-fr.zoom.us/j/85497246420?pwd=[REDACTED]

Journée de séminaire à l’occasion de la soutenance HDR de Cristel Portes
2023-12-01 10:00 - 19:00 | B011 LPL, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Programme
10h Brechtje Post (University of Cambridge, England)
10h Elisabeth Delais-Roussarie (Université de Nantes & LLING)
11h Coffee break
11h30 Stefan Baumann (University of Cologne, Germany)
12h15 Lunch ILCB
14h Soutenance HDR, Cristel Portes (Aix-Marseille University & CNRS/LPL)

Présentation de Elisabeth Delais-Roussarie (Université de Nantes & LLING)

Title: Faisceau d’indices phonétiques fins et interprétation : le cas des questions non-canoniques
Abstract: En m’appuyant sur les résultats de différentes études menées dans le but de caractériser la prosodie associée à des formes particulières de questions (questions alternatives (Delais-Roussarie & Turco 2019), questions rhétoriques (Beyssade & Delais-Roussarie 2022), questions non-canoniques de surprise (Celle & Pélissier 2022)), je tenterai de montrer que l’interprétation d’un énoncé, notamment d’une question non-canonique, est le résultat d’une convergence d’indices de nature diverse (grammaticaux, mais aussi phonétiques, gestuels, situationnels). Au plan simplement prosodique, des détails phonétiques fins tels que le débit, le registre, les trajectoires des mouvements mélodiques ou la qualité vocale interviennent sans doute davantage que la forme et la distribution des contours intonatifs nucléaires.

Présentation de Stefan Baumann (Université de Cologne, Allemagne)
Title: Head movements and pitch accents as cues to information status in (L1 and L2) French
Abstract: Languages differ in the way prosodic prominence is implemented to mark information status or focus (e.g. Kügler & Calhoun, 2020). At a parallel level of description, gestures have been found to occur more frequently with new and inferable referents than with given ones (e.g. Debreslioska & Gullberg 2020). For foreign languages, previous research has shown that deaccenting given information may be challenging for speakers of languages which use this strategy less (e.g. Rasier & Hiligsmann 2007). As for gestures, there is evidence that learners tend to over-explicitly mark referring expressions such as pronouns (Yoshioka 2008). To our knowledge, an analysis of information status expressed through both prosodic and gestural prominence (here: head movements) in L2 speech has not been carried out so far. In the present study, 25 Catalan learners of French were video recorded giving a short description of their best friend in French. The recordings were annotated in terms of information status (RefLex Scheme, Riester & Baumann 2017), pitch accents (F_ToBI, Delais- Roussarie et al. 2015), perceived prominence (DIMA, Kügler et al. 2022) and head movement types and apexes (M3D, Rohrer et al. 2020). Results show that Catalan learners of French marked new and inferable information more than given information either with pitch accents alone or with a combination of pitch accents and gestures. Given information was generally marked as less prominent than new(er) information (more initial accents, fewer rises, lower level of perceived prominence, fewer head movements) but still received a large proportion of pitch accents. However, no difference between the types of accent and only slight differences between the types of head movement were found in non-given categories. The results of an analysis of the same task by 7 French native speakers are compared with the learners’ results. L1 French speakers mark the extreme values of information status (i.e. given and new) in a more pronounced way using more fine-grained differences in pitch accent type.
References: Debreslioska, S., & Gullberg, M. (2020). What’s New? Gestures accompany inferable rather than brand-new referents in discourse. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 1935.
Delais-Roussarie et al. (2015) Intonational Phonology of French: Developing a ToBI system for French In S. Frota & P. Prieto (Eds.), Intonation in Romance. OUP.
Kügler, F., Baumann, S. & Röhr, C.T. (2022). Deutsche Intonation, Modellierung und Annotation (DIMA) – Richtlinien zur prosodischen Annotation des Deutschen. In: Schwarze, C. & Grawunder, S. (Eds.),
Transkription und Annotation gesprochener Sprache und multimodaler Interaktion (pp. 23–54). Narr. Kügler, F. & Calhoun, S. (2020). Prosodic encoding of information structure: A typological perspective. The Oxford Handbook of Language Prosody (pp. 454–467). Oxford Academic.
Rasier, L. & Hiligsmann, P. (2007). Prosodic transfer from L1 to L2. Theoretical and methodological issues. Nouveaux cahiers de linguistique française, 28, 41–66.
Riester, A. & Baumann S. (2017). The RefLex Scheme – Annotation Guidelines. SinSpeC. Working Papers of the SFB 732, vol. 14. University of Stuttgart.
Rohrer, P., Vilà-Giménez, I, Florit-Pons, J., Esteve-Gibert, N., Ren, A., Shattuck-Hufnagel, S., Prieto, P. (2020).
The MultiModal MultiDimensional (M3D) labeling system. Yoshioka, K. (2008). Gesture and information structure in first and second language. Gesture, 8, 236–255.
Présentation HDR Cristel Portes
Titre : De la prosodie du discours au sens de l’intonation en dialogue(s)
Résumé : Même s’il est aujourd’hui moins controversé que cela ne le fut que l’intonation fait partie de la grammaire des langues, définir quelles sont les primitives de l’analyse intonative et comment elles contribuent au sens d’un énoncé reste un défi et un enjeu majeur. Mes recherches défendent l’idée de la ‘normalité linguistique’ de l’intonation et du sens de l’intonation en essayant d’en identifier la spécificité. Je défends l’idée d’une ‘double articulation’ des configurations intonatives en unités porteuses de sens (les accents mélodiques et les tons de frontière), elles-mêmes décomposables en unités sans signification (les tons). Je défends la thèse que le sens de l’intonation reflète la dimension intimement dialogique et interactionnelle du langage à plusieurs égards : 1) il indique quelles parties de l’énoncé font référence aux connaissances partagées par les interlocuteurs versus à l’enjeu spécifique de l’énoncé ; 2) il indique comment le locuteur assume et/ou attribue à l’interlocuteur les connaissances ou les croyances mises en jeu par la situation évoquée par l’énoncé ; 3) il suggère les attentes du locuteur concernant la forme que l’énoncé suivant devrait avoir, sa source et ses relations potentielles avec l’énoncé en cours.
Title: From the prosody of discourse to intonational meaning in dialogue(s)
Abstract: Even if it is less controversial today than it used to be that intonation is part of the grammar of languages, it is still a challenge and a major issue to define what the primitives of intonational analysis are and how they contribute to the meaning of the utterance. My research defends the idea of the ‘linguistic normality’ of intonation and intonational meaning by attempting to identify its specificity. I defend the ‘double articulation’ of intonational patterns into meaning-carrying units (pitch accents and boundary tones), which can themselves be broken down into meaningless units (tones). I argue that the meaning of intonation reflects the intimately dialogical and interactional dimension of language in several respects: 1) it indicates which parts of the utterance refer to the knowledge shared by the interlocutors versus to the specific issue at stake in the utterance; 2) it indicates how the speaker assumes and/or attributes to the addressee the knowledge and beliefs brought into play by the situation evoked by the utterance; 3) it suggests speakers’ expectations about the form that the following utterance should take, its source and its potential relations with the utterance in progress.
Jury/committee: Stefan Baumann, Claire Beyssade, Elisabeth Delais-Roussarie, Mariapaola D’Imperio, Martine Grice, Brechtje Post, Michael Wagner.

Aesthetic Experience across disciplines
2024-01-22 | Le CAMPUS SAINT CHARLES, place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13003
The students from the Master in Cognitive sciences invite you to an interdisciplinary workshop on Aesthetic Experience across disciplines
Beauty, as a reflection of our perception, unfolds in as many different ways as there are people to contemplate it. This leads us to wonder: what is the basis of individual and collective aesthetic experience. In an effort to explore its complexity, we embark on an intellectual journey where experts will share their vision of the aesthetic experiences according to their discipline, from philosophy to neuroscience.

A Large-Scale Analysis of Human Question-Asking Strategies in a Referential Visual Search Task
2024-02-01 13:00 - 14:00
Alberto Testoni, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation – University of Amsterdam.
Abstract:
In recent years, a multitude of datasets of human–human conversations has been released for the main purpose of training conversational agents based on data-hungry artificial neural networks. Datasets of this sort represent a useful and underexplored source to validate, complement, and enhance cognitive studies on human behavior and language use. We present a method that leverages the recent development of powerful computational models to obtain the fine-grained annotation required to apply metrics and techniques from Cognitive Science to large datasets. Previous work in Cognitive Science has investigated the question-asking strategies of human participants by employing different variants of the so-called 20-question-game setting and proposing several evaluation methods. In my talk, I focus on GuessWhat, a task proposed within the Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing communities that is similar in structure to the 20-question-game setting. Crucially, the GuessWhat dataset contains tens of thousands of dialogues based on real-world images, making it a suitable setting to investigate the question-asking strategies of human players on a large scale and in a natural setting. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of computational tools to automatically code how the hypothesis space changes throughout the dialogue in complex visual scenes. On the one hand, we confirm findings from previous work on smaller and more controlled settings. On the other hand, our analyses allow us to highlight the presence of “uninformative” questions (in terms of Expected Information Gain) at specific rounds of the dialogue. We hypothesize that these questions fulfill pragmatic constraints that human players exploit to solve visual tasks in complex scenes successfully. Our work illustrates a method that brings together efforts and findings from different disciplines to gain a better understanding of human question-asking strategies on large-scale datasets, while at the same time posing new questions about the development of conversational systems.
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Cognitive Engineering module of the ILCB's Masters of Cognitive Science (MasCo)
2024-02-02

Understanding Understanding -- in General, and in Large Language Models
2024-02-09 12:00 - 13:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
David Schlangen : Professor, “Foundations of Computational Linguistics”, University of Potsdam
Abstract:
In the first part of the talk I will present an overview of the activities of my group (Foundations of CompLing at Uni Potsdam), organised around the quest to understand how linguistic communication can yield shared understanding. I will present an analytical framework in which similarities and differences in method and approach between text NLU (natural language understanding) and SLU (situated language understanding) can be described.
In the second part, and motivated by this framework, I will present a new computational framework for the evaluation of “chat-optimized LLMs” (cLLMs) like ChatGPT for their capabilities in task-oriented interaction.

Phylogénies hérétiques de la bioluminescence : quels partenariats peut-on inventer avec les organismes lumineux ?
2024-02-23 11:00 - 12:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Jeremie Brugidou : Artiste-chercheur · PhD Art&Sciences – Recherche-Création · ENS / Paris 8 / Nanterre / Aix-Marseille – Romans / Films / Installations et performances
Phylogénies hérétiques de la bioluminescence : quels partenariats peut-on inventer avec les organismes lumineux ?
À travers une approche théorique, historique, expérimentale et science fictionnelle, je propose de réfléchir aux liens qui nous unissent à ces autres vivants qui produisent de la lumière.
