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Dear members of the ILCB community, |
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For some of us, Christmas arrived well ahead of time… Congratulations to Aline Frey for the prize awarded by the Ministry of Education, which recognizes her efforts to develop innovative school interventions that improve students’ academic learning and skills, and congratulations to Nicolas Claidière and his collaborators for an outstanding theoretical contribution to science, presenting a biocultural framework for language evolution.
This is what makes the ILCB so special: groundbreaking, interdisciplinary theoretical work that extends to real-world societal applications. The publications featured in this newsletter provide several other impressive examples of this dynamic.
Looking back on 2025, I must say that it has been an outstanding scientific year, despite a sociopolitical context that increasingly threatens science across the world. I would like to thank all of you for your dedication and contributions throughout the year.
I wish you a peaceful holiday season and every success, both personal and scientific, in the year ahead. |
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What enables human language? A biocultural framework |
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To account for human language, we propose a multifaceted and explicitly biocultural framework grounded in empirical investigations spanning a diverse array of empirical and theoretical fields. The framework is illustrated with three facets of language with distinctive evolutionary history, each involving multiple disciplines and several species — e.g., humans, primates, and songbirds. Such case studies highlight the importance of both biological preparedness and cultural processes, as well as the interactions between them, in the emergence of language. The empty gray boxes suggest other facets of language, not discussed, that could be similarly investigated under this framework.
Arnon, Inbal, Liran Carmel, Nicolas Claidière, et al. 2025.
What Enables Human Language? A Biocultural Framework
Science 390 (6775): eadq8303. — @HAL
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A classic riddle for the holiday season… Read the following sentence and count the number of instances of the letter F within it:
"FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS."
If your answer is a prime number, your count is incorrect. You can try again, or read more about this illusion, and its cognitive and neural underpinnings at
J. Don Read. 1983.
‘Detection of Fs in a Single Statement: The Role of Phonetic Recoding’.
Memory & Cognition 11 (4): 390–99.
Raymond M. Klein and Jean Saint-Aubin. 2016.
‘What a Simple Letter-Detection Task Can Tell Us About Cognitive Processes in Reading’.
Current Directions in Psychological Science 25 (6): 417–24.
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NLP & Cognition: Exploring the Interfaces |
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📅 Friday, December 12, 2025
📍 Campus Saint-Charles, Marseille – Seminar Room (Frumam)
Including the keynote "The Neural Encoding of Syntactic Dependencies in Humans and AI Models" by Yair Lakretz, LSCP (CNRS & Ecole Normale Supérieure)
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8th annual meeting - The Society for the Cognitive Science of Culture |
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📅 22nd to 24th of April, 2026 — 📍Aix-en-Provence (Le Cube)
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16ème journée scientifique du Centre IRM : Imagerie quantitative et ses applications |
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📅 May the 4th, 2026 —
📍 CERIMED, Campus Timone.
The contributions will highlight methodological advances, particularly in spectroscopy, quantitative mapping, and in vivo histology. They will illustrate how these methods 1) enable an understanding of individual differences and brain plasticity, for example in development and aging or language learning, and 2) show promise for the identification of biomarkers and therapeutic targets, for example in the case of neurodegenerative diseases. |
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Summary of upcoming events
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8th annual meeting - The Society for the Cognitive Science of Culture |
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📅 April 22nd to 24th, 2026 — 📍LE CUBE, Campus Schuman, Aix-en-Provence |
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16th MRI scientific day: Quantitative imaging and its applications |
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📅 May the 4th, 2026 — 📍CERIMED, Campus Timone, Marseille
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Workshop organized by Docs & Post-docs for the ILCB |
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📅 March 20th, 2026 — 📍FRUMAN, Campus Saint-Charles, Marseille
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Integrating Neural Noise and Neuroinflammatory Hypotheses: Exploring the Comorbidity of Dyslexia, Depression, and Stress |
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💡 Lunch Talk by Prof. Fumiko Hoeft,
University of Connecticut —
📅 May 22nd, 2026 — 📍TBA |
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9th ILCB summer school |
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📅 Aug. 24th to 28th, 2026 — 📍LE CUBE, Campus Schuman, Aix-en-Provence |
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Please always check the events page on the ILCB website for the latest update. |
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ILCB is affiliated to Aix-Marseille Université, CNRS, INSERM, and Université d'Avignon
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Copyright © ILCB 2025
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