ILCB's monthly newsletter N°42

ILCB's monthly newsletter

N°42 – Dec. 15th, 2024

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,

Looks like Christmas came early for some of us… After Isabelle Dautriche and Bruno Giordano, Kristof Strijkers just obtained an ERC Consolidator grant. Nothing seems to resist us: well done!

We also celebrate the happy ends for our brilliant PhD students who are defending their theses shortly before the holiday season: Auriane Boudin (LPL), Isaïh Mohamed (INS), Floor Meewis (CRPN), Anaïs Cauna (LPL/CRPN), Emilia Kerr (LPL), Leonardo Pinto Arata (CRPN), and Estelle Hervé (LPL).

We are proud of you all and wish you good luck for your next journey! I hope you will continue to be ILCB ambassadors wherever your steps take you... and that you won’t forget to come back whenever you can!

As last year, the Multimodality in Social Interactions 2.0 workshop was a great success. Great discussions on hot topics in a relaxed environment. Thanks to the organizers and all the speakers.

2024 is coming to an end. So many things happened, and the outcome is extremely positive. I wish to thank all of you for your time an effort to make ILCB such an interesting and bustling place. Special thanks to Nadera Bureau and Lilia Mena for their daily support.

I look forward to seeing all of you back in 2025! In the meantime, take care and enjoy the break.

Best wishes,

Johannes

Portraits of the month

Kristof Strijkers

Kristof Strijkers obtained an MA in psychology at Ghent University (Belgium) in 2006, and a second MA in cognitive neuroscience and language in 2007 at the University of Barcelona (Spain). Pursuing his research in Barcelona, he defended a PhD entitled “The Electrophysiology of Language Production: Lexical Access in Picture Naming” in 2012 at the same university. Krtistof obtained a Marie Curie post-doctoral fellowship to work at the Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive (LPC) of CNRS. Since 2014, Kristof is a full-time CNRS researcher at the Laboratoire Parole et Langage (LPL) in…

Véronique Sabadell

Véronique Sabadell has been a speech therapist since 2008. In 2015, she obtained a Master’s degree in Health Research and Organization – Clinical Research in Rehabilitation in Paris. She later obtained funding from the John Bost Foundation to undertake a PhD in Cognitive Sciences under the supervision of Xavier Alario (CRPN) and Agnès Trébuchon (INS). In 2023, véronique defended a PhD thesis entitled “Rehabilitation of Anomia and Surgery for Drug-Resistant Temporal Epilepsy.” Last week, Véronique was awarded the thesis Prize by UNADREO, the French learned society for speech and language…

Figure of the month

Different sustained and induced alpha oscillation in the human auditory cortex during sound processing

Alpha oscillations in the auditory cortex are key to attention and the suppression of irrelevant information. Using intra-cerebral recordings, López-Madrona et al. identified two distinct neural sources during rest and auditory stimulation: "oscillatory" sources, defined by strong alpha oscillations at rest, and "evoked" sources, characterised by significant responses to stimuli. Two alpha mechanisms were identified (left panel) a sustained suppression of oscillatory sources, reflecting a general disinhibition of the network to facilitate sensory information processing; and (right panel) a bottom-up induced response of evoked sources to process the stimulus.

Víctor J. López-Madrona, Agnès Trébuchon, Christian G. Bénar, Daniele Schön, et Benjamin Morillon
Different Sustained and Induced Alpha Oscillations Emerge in the Human Auditory Cortex during Sound Processing
Communications Biology 7 (1): 1570. – @HAL

Quote of the month

"Let's not forget that the book has been our ally for centuries in a war that is absent from history textbooks. The struggle to preserve our most valuable creations: words, which are scarcely a puff of air; the stories we tell to give meaning to chaos and to survive it; the true, false, always provisional knowledge we scratch across the hard rock of our ignorance."

Irene Vallejo. 2022.
Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World.
Translated (Spanish) by Charlotte Whittle. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Disponible aussi en français :
Irene Vallejo. 2021.
L’infini dans un roseau: L’invention des livres dans l’Antiquité.
Traduit (espagnol) par Anne Plantagenet. Paris: Les Belles Lettres.