ILCB's monthly newsletter N°44

ILCB's monthly newsletter

N°44 - Feb. 15th, 2025

Institute of Language, Communication and the Brain
Bringing together experts in linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, medicine and computer science to understand and to model how language functions.

Dear members of the ILCB community,

I hope your year is off to a great start! Big congratulations to Abdellah Fourtassi (LIS) and Bruno Giordano (INT) for successfully defending their habilitations! And a warm welcome to Philippe Albouy, our 2025 ILCB-IMERA chair—you can check out his portrait below! He’ll be joining us at the end of the summer, starting his visiting appointment at our ILCB Summer School.

It’s that time of the year again—we need to collect indicators for our annual report. If you’ve published any relevant papers in 2024 that aren’t yet on the ILCB HAL repository, please upload them or send us a copy. Have you received awards, grants, or participated in outreach activities related to ILCB research? Let us know! Every contribution counts, so please send your updates to Lilia Mena.

Mark your calendars! At the end of the month, Olivier Collignon will give a fascinating talk on multi-sensory brain networks and their plasticity. Make sure to register if you stay for lunch.

I looking forward to catching up with you all soon!

Best wishes,

Johannes

Portrait of the month

Philippe Albouy

Dr. Philippe Albouy has just been awarded the 2025 IMERA/ILCB chair, starting next September. Philippe Albouy is an associate professor at the psychology department of Laval University (Québec city, Canada), regular researcher at CERVO Brain Research Centre, CHU de Québec research Center…

Figure of the month

Influence of musical background on children’s handwriting

Handwriting is a complex activity involving temporal and rhythmic organization. We tested whether this graphic movement can be influenced by listening to rhythmic cues. Second and Fifth Graders were asked to trace loops while listening to (i) a melodic background without a metronome, (ii) a melodic background with a slow metronome (1.6 Hz), or (iii) a melodic background with a faster metronome (2.2 Hz). Rhythmic background influenced writing kinematics differently depending on grade and tempo. The youngest group increased their velocity in the presence of the rhythms, whereas the oldest group slowed down in the presence of the slow metronome. This differential effect of tempo suggests that the rhythmic background influences children's writing differently according to their individual writing frequency.

Margaux Lê, Marianne Jover, Aline Frey, & Jérémy Danna.
Influence of Musical Background on Children’s Handwriting: Effects of Melody and Rhythm
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 252 (2025):106184 – @HAL

Quote of the month

Socrates recalls a dialogue between Theuth and Thamus about the invention of letters:

"this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality."

Phaedrus by Plato
translated by Benjamin Jowett;
a Project Gutenberg EBook.