Round 3 Student Travel Awards

Congratulations to the following CRLMB student members who were chosen to receive Round 2 Travel Awards from the Centre, in the amount of $700:

• K. Saito
• B. Elgie
• K. Kasparian
• A. Gascon
• S. Rigoulot
• A. Simonenko

These awards may not be used in conjunction with another travel award, such as the Alma Mater, for the same conference.

Award Requirements

Recipients are requested and required to:

• Identify student authors and advisors as centre members in the authorship line of the poster, in following way: Name, CRLMB, Dept, University. If this is not permitted, membership in, and support by the Centre, is to be listed in acknowledgements
• All students are requested (and required) to acknowledge the support of the Centre by including our logo on your poster or presentation
• Within 10 days of your return from the conference, an expense report must be submitted to the Centre accompanied by: 1) original receipts; 2) boarding passes; 3) proof of receipt of your poster at the conference attended; and 4) an 8.5 X 11 pdf copy of your poster;

McGill students are to complete an expense report on Minerva. If your advisor is covering the balance of expenses, the report should be sent for approval to your departmental designate, who will contact the Centre for a FOAPAL. It is important that only one expense report be filed (by McGill students) for any conference attended.

Students from our other member universities are asked to download and complete the visitor claimant signature form, to make sure your name and mailing address is completed (it is NOT necessary to complete the section for wire transfer/director deposit) and to send the form, with all original receipts, boarding passes, conference acceptance and an 8.5 X 11 pdf of your poster to:

Lisa Coady
CRLMB - Rabinovitch House
McGill University
3640 rue de la Montagne
Montreal, QC H3G 2A8

Round 2 Student Travel Awards

Congratulations to the following CRLMB student members who were chosen to receive Round 2 Travel Awards from the Centre, in the amount of $700:

• J. Soles
• F. Brosseau-Lapré
• N. Sheikh
• A. Delcenserie
• A. Melançon

Award Requirements

Recipients are requested and required to:

• Identify student authors and advisors as centre members in the authorship line of the poster, in following way: Name, CRLMB, Dept, University. If this is not permitted, membership in, and support by the Centre, is to be listed in acknowledgements
• All students are requested (and required) to acknowledge the support of the Centre by including our logo on your poster or presentation
• Within 10 days of your return from the conference, an expense report must be submitted to the Centre accompanied by: 1) original receipts; 2) boarding passes; 3) proof of receipt of your poster at the conference attended; and 4) an 8.5 X 11 pdf copy of your poster;

McGill students are to complete an expense report on Minerva. If your advisor is covering the balance of expenses, the report should be sent for approval to your departmental designate, who will contact the Centre for a FOAPAL. It is important that only one expense report be filed (by McGill students) for any conference attended.

Students from our other member universities are asked to download and complete the visitor claimant signature form, to make sure your name and mailing address is completed (it is NOT necessary to complete the section for wire transfer/director deposit) and to send the form, with all original receipts, boarding passes, conference acceptance and an 8.5 X 11 pdf of your poster to:

Lisa Coady
CRLMB - Rabinovitch House
McGill University
3640 rue de la Montagne
Montreal, QC H3G 2A8

Round 1 Student Travel Awards

Congratulations to the following CRLMB student members who were chosen to receive Round 1 Travel Awards from the Centre, in the amount of $700:

• M. Zvaigzne
• C. Qu
• I. Pivneva
• K. Kasparian
• Y. Senoo
• N. Bourgignon

Award Requirements

Recipients are requested and required to:

• Identify student authors and advisors as centre members in the authorship line of the poster, in following way: Name, CRLMB, Dept, University. If this is not permitted, membership in, and support by the Centre, is to be listed in acknowledgements
• All students are requested (and required) to acknowledge the support of the Centre by including our logo on your poster or presentation
• Within 10 days of your return from the conference, an expense report must be submitted to the Centre accompanied by: 1) original receipts; 2) boarding passes; 3) proof of receipt of your poster at the conference attended; and 4) an 8.5 X 11 pdf copy of your poster;

McGill students are to complete an expense report on Minerva. If your advisor is covering the balance of expenses, the report should be sent for approval to your departmental designate, who will contact the Centre for a FOAPAL. It is important that only one expense report be filed (by McGill students) for any conference attended.

Students from our other member universities are asked to download and complete the visitor claimant signature form, to make sure your name and mailing address is completed (it is NOT necessary to complete the section for wire transfer/director deposit) and to send the form, with all original receipts, boarding passes, conference acceptance and an 8.5 X 11 pdf of your poster to:

Lisa Coady
CRLMB - Rabinovitch House
McGill University
3640 rue de la Montagne
Montreal, QC H3G 2A8

Round 3 Student Travel Awards

Congratulations to the following CRLMB student members who were chosen to receive Round 3 Travel Awards from the Centre:

• W. Dalton
• E. Pauker
• C. Mark
• A. Gilbert
• K. Saito
• J. Gao

All students are requested (and required) to acknowledge the support of the Centre by including our logo on your poster or presentation. Within 10 days of your return from the conference, please complete the student expense reimbursement form, and send it, with original receipts, to:

Lisa Coady
CRLMB - Rabinovitch House
McGill University
3640 rue de la Montagne
Montreal, QC H3G 2A8

Please note that only one expense report can be filed (by McGill students) for any conference attended. Any recipient whose advisor will cover the balance of travel expenses, and who is unsure as to how the ER should be completed, is asked to call the Centre for instructions in advance of completing the report.

Enhancing performance for perception and action - Multisensory inegration, neuroplasticity & neuroprosthetics

The XXXIInd International Symposium of the Groupe de recherche sur le système nerveux central, entitled "Enhancing performance for perception and action – Multisensory integration, neuroplasticity & neuroprosthetics" will be held on May 10-11, 2010 at Pavillon Roger-Gaudry, room Ernest-Cormier (K-500) at the Université de Montréal. Dr. David Ostry will be a featured speaker in Session 1, "MECHANISMS TO IMPROVE MOTOR PERFORMANCE." His talk, "Sensory plasticity and motor learning" is scheduled for Monday, May 10th at 9:40 p.m.

The objective of the conference is to provide an overview of the various neural mechanisms that contribute to learning new motor and sensory skills, and to adapting to changed circumstances including the use of devices and implants to substitute for lost sensory or motor abilities (brain machine interfaces, BMI).

The symposium will focus on recent developments covering four major themes: 1) Mechanisms to enhance motor performance; 2) Mechanisms to enhance sensory performance; 3) Multisensory interactions and its role in enhancing action and perception; 4) Technological interventions to restore action and perception (BMI).

Submissions are invited for a limited number of poster presentations. A selection will be made from the submitted abstracts.

Deadline for poster submissions: March 31, 2010. Information and registration: http://www.grsnc.umontreal.ca/32s/

Graduate and postdoctoral fellowships in Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience

Applications for graduate and postdoctoral fellowships in Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience, beginning September 1 2010, are now opened. This program is funded by an NSERC-Create Training grant in auditory cognitive neuroscience which enables graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to obtain funding in a research area related to Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience through one of our partner universities in Canada (McGill, McMaster, and Univ of Montreal). The training program also offers internships in academic, industrial and health care settings. Citizens of all countries are eligible to apply.

Graduate applicants who plan to be enrolled in a full-time graduate program at one of the partner universities are eligible to apply; annual stipend is $17,300 (Master's level) and $21,000 (Doctoral level). Postdoctoral applicants who will have received their PhD by August 31 2010 are eligible to apply; annual stipends are $40,000.

The deadline for Graduate and Postdoctoral applications is January 15, 2010.

Full program details, including application materials, curriculum, internships, and mentors' research programs, are available at www.acn-create.org

Round 2 Student Travel Awards

Congratulations to the following CRLMB student members who were chosen to receive Round 2 Travel Awards from the Centre:

• M. Cyr
• A. Delcenserie
• M-J. Blais
• E. Melkonyan
• S. Smits-Bandstra

All students are requested (and required) to acknowledge the support of the Centre by including our logo on your poster or presentation. Within 10 days of your return from the conference, please complete the student expense reimbursement form, and send it, with original receipts, to:

Lisa Coady
CRLMB - Rabinovitch House
McGill University
3640 rue de la Montagne
Montreal, QC H3G 2A8

Please note that only one expense report can be filed (by McGill students) for any conference attended. Any recipient whose advisor will cover the balance of travel expenses, and who is unsure as to how the ER should be completed, is asked to call the Centre for instructions in advance of completing the report.

Rnd 1 Student Travel Awards

Round 1 Student Travel Awards recipients are now posted in the Students Corner

Deadline for Round 1 student travel grants is June 12

Students wishing to apply for one of five $700 Round 1 Travel grants are advised that the deadline for application is June 12 at noon. Info and application ....

Nominate a speaker for the 09/10 Distinguished Lecture Series

It is time once again to nominate distinguished scientists for our highly successful, annual speaker series. CRLMB members and students are invited to participate by nominating lecturers for the 0910 roster. Please complete the form below and submit your suggestions to the CRLMB Outreach Committee. All submissions will be considered, but the committee will select nominees who have achieved high international stature in their fields. You are welcome to propose more than one speaker, but please do so by completing and submitting the form separately for each one.

Your Name:
Name of proposed speaker (Last Name, First Name, please)
Provide a URL for proposed speaker's homepage
In which theme does your proposed speaker's research fall?	Language Acquisition Neural Bases of Language Speech Science Modeling Visual Language Processing

The LOLA Series: Lectures on language acquisition for parents, clinicians and teachers

Dr. Gary Dell

Implicit learning in the language production system as revealed by speech errors: Some studies within an emerging framework in psycholinguistics

CRLMB Distinguished Lecture Series - Presentation by Dr. Gary Dell

Friday, April 17, 2008 at 1:30 pm -3:00 pm
Room 1034, McIntyre Medical Building

Dr. Gary Dell is professor in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Department of Psychology, as well as a full-time faculty member of the Beckman Institute Cognitive Science group

Abstract

Psycholinguistics is traditionally described as the study of comprehension, production, and acquisition, with the unifying theme being that these three abilities are informative about the role of grammar in linguistic performance. An emerging framework within modern psycholinguistics has a different view on the unity of the "psycholinguistic trinity," one that is based on the relationship between processing and learning. I review this framework generally, and exemplify it with our group's recent research on the learning of phonotactic-like constraints in experimental settings.

Round 3 Student Travel Awards

Congratulations to the following CRLMB student members who were chosen to receive Round 3 Travel Awards from the Centre:

• E. Koulaguina
• B. Lochbihler
• A. Belikova
• I. Deschamps
• E. Pauker

All students are requested (and required) to acknowledge the support of the Centre by including our logo on your poster or presentation. Within 10 days of your return from the conference, please complete the student expense reimbursement form, and send it, with original receipts, to:

Lisa Coady
CRLMB - Rabinovitch House
McGill University
3640 rue de la Montagne
Montreal, QC H3G 2A8

Please note that only one expense report can be filed (by McGill students) for any conference attended. Any recipient whose advisor will cover the balance of travel expenses, and who is unsure as to how the ER should be completed, is asked to call the Centre for instructions in advance of completing the report.

International Research Internship Opportunity

A second call is issued to eligible Ph.D. student members of the CRLMB, to apply for an international research internship, of one to three months in duration. The internship opportunity is made possible through the provision of $15000 to each strategic cluster supported by le Fonds quebecois de recherche sur la nature et les technologies (FQRNT) and le Fonds quebecois de recherche sur la société et la culture (FQRSC), with the aim of promoting international scientific research and training for student members. The deadline for applications for the internship is February 25, 2009. All internships must begin by, at latest, March 31, 2010. Ph.D. candidates may apply for an internship of one to three months in duration, at a research institute/university in one of the following countries: Germany, Brazil, China, France, United-Kingdom, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, USA, Belgium, Catalonia. The monthly stipend for the internship totals $2500 CAD. Therefore, the Centre may support: 1) one candidate on a six-month internship; 2) two candidates on a 3-month internship; or 3) three candidates on a 2-month internship.

Eligiblity:

Applicants must be:

• full-time doctoral students supervised by a CRLMB member
• officially registered with the Centre
• a Canadian citizen or a permanent resident of Canada
• resident in the province of Quebec for at least one year at the time of application. Acceptable proof of residency would include a photocopy of a valid health card, or proof of a Quebec tax return having been filed in the previous year.

Application:

Each applicant must submit, by February 25, 2009:

1. A CV, including a list of publications and awards
2. A 3-5 page proposal including:
   • the name and contact information of the host supervisor and foreign institution where the research activity will be pursued, and a detailed timeline, including start and end dates (start –no later than March 31, 2010-)
   • a summary of the intended research activities during the study period abroad (including objectives, methodology, and expected outcomes) and an indication of how this relates to the student’s main graduate research topic
   • an indication of how the student’s research project in the foreign institution relates to the Centre’s research axes or activities and to the Centre’s international activities
   • a budget which provides estimates for costs of travel, living and other expenses during the research study period (to a maximum of $15,000)
3. letters of support from the thesis advisor and the host supervisor

Applications will be reviewed by a three-member panel of CRLMB faculty, and the selected candidate(s) will be notified by March 10, 2009. Please send an electronic copy of your CV and proposal to lisa dot coady at mcgill dot ca, with a subject line of "international stage proposal." Send a hard copy of all required materials to: Centre for Research on Language, Mind and Brain Rabinovitch House, McGill University 3640 rue de la Montagne Montreal, QC H3G 2A8

Dr. Ted Gibson

Assessing the relationship between language, cognition, and culture: The Pirahã

CRLMB Distinguished Lecture Series - Presentation by Dr. Ted Gibson

Monday, February 2, 2008 at 12:00 pm -1:30 pm
Location: Room 501, McGill Cancer Pavilion, Life Sciences Complex, 1160 Pine Avenue West

Dr. Ted Gibson is Professor of Brain & Cognitive Sciences and Linguistics at the MIT.

Abstract

A foundational assumption of many researchers investigating the universals of human language is that many properties of language are independent of the cultural context and the non-linguistic cognitive abilities of the(ir) speakers. But it's not clear that this assumption is warranted. Everett (2005) described the case of the Pirahã, an isolated Amazonian tribe who are allegedly characterized by very unusual linguistic and non-linguistic cognitive properties (e.g., finite language, lack of words for numbers and colors, lack of quantifiers). Critically, he argued that all these properties can be accounted for by a general cultural constraint against abstraction. The validity of these claims remains an open question. I will report some initial results from a set of experiments I conducted in collaboration with Mike Frank and Ev Fedorenko during a visit to a Pirahã village in 2007 in order to test some of these claims.

AND

The nature of working memory resources underlying language processing

CRLMB Distinguished Lecture Series - Presentation by Dr. Ev Fedorenko

Monday, February 2, 2008 at 1:30 pm -2:30 pm
Location: Location: Room 501, McGill Cancer Pavilion, Life Sciences Complex, 1160 Pine Avenue West

Dr. Ev Fedorenko is a postdoctoral associate at the Kanwisher Lab (McGovern Institute for Brain Research) at MIT

Abstract

A fundamental question in cognitive science concerns the extent to which our mind consists of independent cognitive modules— subserved by highly specialized neural structures—dedicated to specific cognitive functions. I investigate this question with regard to the working memory resources underlying language processing. I present a series of behavioral studies aimed at investigating the extent to which the working memory system underlying language processing is domain-specific. I argue that the results of these experiments demonstrate that at least some aspects of the working memory system used for linguistic integrations are not domain-specific, being involved in arithmetic, and possibly, musical processing.

Dr. Michael Tanenhaus

Fine-grained phonetic detail in spoken word recognition

CRLMB Distinguished Lecture Series - Presentation by Dr. Michael Tanenhaus

Friday, December 12, 2008 at 1:30 pm -3:00 pm
Room 1034, McIntyre Medical Building

Dr. Michael Tanenhaus is Beverly Petterson Bishop and Charles W. Bishop Professor of Brain & Cognitive Sciences and Linguistics at the University of Rochester. He is also Director of the Center for Language Sciences

Abstract

Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, it is widely assumed that some classes of speech sounds are perceived categorically in a way that exemplars from other types of non-speech categories are not. Yet, the articulation of many sounds, including consonants, varies systematically with position in a prosodic domain. A system that discarded sub-phonetic detail would thus be ignoring potentially useful information. I'll review recent data from eye-tracking studies demonstrating that spoken word recognition does, in fact, exploit fine-grained sub-phonetic detail to make probabilistic hypothesis about lexical candidates, including within-category variation for stop consonants--once the poster child for categorical perception. I'll conclude by presenting evidence from perceptual learning studies suggesting that listeners might make optimal use of the distributional information provided by within-category variation.

Dr. Ken Pugh

Neuroimaging studies of reading and language development: An update on recent findings

CRLMB Distinguished Lecture Series - Presentation by Dr. Ken Pugh

Friday, November 7, 2008 at 1:30 pm -3:00 pm
Room 1034, McIntyre Medical Building

Dr. Ken Pugh is President and Director of Research, Senior Scientist, at Haskins Laboratories, in New Haven, Connecticut

Abstract

Our research combines several types of neuroimaging technologies with intensive behavioral testing in order to examine developmental trajectories for language and reading in both reading disabled (RD) and non-impaired (NI) cohorts. In studies of both adults and children, RD readers demonstrate anomalous brain activation patterns at posterior regions in the left hemisphere (LH) during tasks that make explicit demands on phonological processing, along with, what appears to be, a compensatory reliance on frontal lobe sites and right hemisphere systems. Brain/behavior analyses have indicated that the development of reading fluency in young children is strongly associated with the development of the left hemisphere posterior reading system.

Our new longitudinal project is aimed at establishing key neuro-chemical and genetic factors associated with atypical brain/behavior trajectories; initial findings will be discussed. With regard to plasticity and learning, intervention studies have examined the influence of intensive phonological remediation in young at-risk children, revealing substantial gains in both reading scores and development of these LH reading systems for children afforded this treatment. Recent extensions of our learning research with older RD readers continue to suggest a high degree of plasticity in this population.

Drs. Jan Edwards and Benjamin Munson

Phonological development by children with typical and atypical speech-sound development: The acquisition (or not) of a (really) complex system

CRLMB Distinguished Lecture Series - Joint presentation by Drs. Jan Edwards and Benjamin Munson

Friday, October 24, 2008 at 1:00 pm -3:00 pm
Room 500, Cancer Pavilion, Life Sciences Complex 1160 av des Pins ouest

Dr. Jan Edwards is a research scientist and Professor of Communicative Disorders at the Waisman Centre, UW-Madison. Dr. Benjamin Munson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

Abstract

In the first few years of life, most children learn to talk, whether they are learning to speak English, or Korean, or both, and whether they live in a middle class American English home where mothers engage in intense interaction with the children using a special emphatic speech style that stresses nouns and labeling, or in a Korean home, where the analogous infant-directed speech style instead emphasizes verbs and the actions that verbs name. Perhaps because of this rapid development, the traditional view of phonological development has posited that developmental changes in productions patterns is the result of a largely automatic and autonomous process in which children move from a relatively universal phonological constraints to ones tailored to the ambient language.

Such a view of phonological development makes many assumptions: for example, it assumes that children’s phonological learning is best described in terms of alphabetic transcription and that patterns of phonological development are similar across different languages. It also predicts that phonological disorders can be best characterized by deficits in abstract phonological knowledge. In this talk, we will present analyses of data from two projects in support of a more nuanced view of phonological development. The first of these is from the paidologos project (ling.osu.edu…). The paidologos project is a cross-linguistic examination of first-language phonological development across a number of languages, including American English, Cantonese, Greek, Japanese, and Mandarin. The second is a project that examined phonological knowledge deficits in children with phonological disorders. Throughout the talk, we will argue that phonological knowledge is a complex system that involves many different levels of representation. The child’s task, as a language learner, is to learn these different levels and the mappings among them. Moreover, deficits in each of these types of knowledge lead to qualitatively different speech and language impairments. [Supported by NIDCD grant R01 DC02932 and NSF grant BCS-0729140 to Jan Edwards, and by NIDCD Grant R03 DC005702 and NSF grant BCS- 0729277 to Benjamin Munson]

Round 2 Travel Awards

Congratulations to the following CRLMB student members who were chosen to receive Round 2 Travel Awards from the Centre:

• A. Marquis
• T. Skinner
• J. Loehr
• D. Fogle
• P. Tremblay

All students are requested (and required) to acknowledge the support of the Centre by including our logo on your poster or presentation. Within 10 days of your return from the conference, please complete the student expense reimbursement form, and send it, with original receipts, to:

Lisa Coady
CRLMB - Rabinovitch House
McGill University
3640 rue de la Montagne
Montreal, QC H3G 2A8

Please note that only one expense report can be filed (by McGill students) for any conference attended. Any recipient whose advisor will cover the balance of travel expenses, and who is unsure as to how the ER should be completed, is asked to call the Centre for instructions in advance of completing the report.

CRLMB 07/08 Annual Report

Our annual report is now available. (Download size: 2.3 MB)

CRLEC-UQAM is established

Thanks to the hard work of Centre AD, Dr. Lucie Ménard, the Centre has a second official location at L'Université du Québec à Montréal. Le Centre de recherche sur le langage, l'esprit et le cerveau at UQAM (CRLEC -UQAM) was established on June 1, 2008. Read the announcement in "L'UQAM au quotidien"

Welcome to Fulbright Scholar, Dr. Robin Panneton

The CRLMB is very pleased to welcome Fulbright Scholar, Dr. Robin Panneton to a four-month term at the Centre. Dr. Panneton (Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 1985) is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA. By training, she is a developmental psychologist with research interests in infant auditory perception.

Dr. Panneton is particularly interested in the development of infants’ preferences for speech patterns, how speech directs infant attention and arousal, native language recognition, and infants’ emerging dependence on visual speech (e.g., face) information. She and her students investigate these issues with infants across the first postnatal year, exploring measures of attention via behavior and psychophysiology. As a 2008 Canadian-U.S. Fulbright Research Chair at the Centre for Research on Language, Mind, and Brain, she will be collaborating with Dr. Linda Polka on a research project that will investigate sources of information that augment infants’ abilities to process linguistic information in the face of perceptual challenge (e.g., noisy backgrounds).

She will also be collaborating with Polka and Drs. David McFarland, and Marc Pell on a new project, entitled “Conversational Profiles between Infants and Caretakers: Relations to Interactional Synchrony, Developing Attention Skills, and Language Competence” (with initial start-up funding from the Centre). Dr. Panneton welcomes additional collaborations with other Centre members.

Dr. Panneton will inaugurate this year's Distinguished Lecture Series, with a talk entitled "Look at me when I talk to you!”: Infants' integration of face and voice information during speech processing," which will be held in the Redpath Museum Auditorium on Friday, October 3rd at 1:30 p.m. All are invited, and refreshments will be served after the talk.

Round 1 Student Travel Awards

Congratulations to the following CRLMB student members were chosen to receive Round 1 Travel Awards from the Centre:

• A Winneke
• C. Dara
• A. Gilbert
• M. Namazi
• J. Mercier

CRLMB logo - powerpoint
CRLMB logo - eps

Recipients are asked to acknowledge support from the Centre, by including our logo on your poster or presentation. The logo is available in powerpoint format (just copy and paste the image from the provided slide into your presentation) or as an eps file, for use with vector graphics programs.

Recipients are also asked to provide a completed student expense report, with original receipts, within two weeks of your return from the conference. If your advisor is: 1) McGill faculty and 2) assuming the balance of your expenses, they must be included on one report, and duly signed before being forwarded to the Centre.

Nominate a lecturer for next year's Speaker Series

It is time once again to nominate distinguished scientists for our highly successful, annual speaker series. CRLMB members and students are invited to participate by nominating lecturers for the 0910 roster. Please complete the form below and submit your ideas to the CRLMB Outreach Committee. All submissions will be considered, but the committee will select nominees who have achieved high international stature in their fields. You are welcome to propose more than one speaker, but please do so by completing and submitting the form separately for each one.

Your Name:
Name of proposed speaker (Last Name, First Name, please)
Provide a URL for proposed speaker's homepage
In which theme does your proposed speaker's research fall?	Language Acquisition Neural Bases of Language Speech Science Modeling Visual Language Processing

Fred Genesee in CCL "Minerva Lecture Series"

CRLMB principal member Dr. Fred Genesee gives an invited lecturer entitled "Early childhood bilingualism: Perils and possibilities," this Friday, April 18th, as part of the Canadian Council on Learning's Minerva Lecture Series. The Minerva Lecture Series is a "traveling, national forum through which the work of prominent Canadian learning researchers can be celebrated and shared with Canadians from all walks of life."

In his lecture, Dr. Genesee outlines "how bilingualism can help support the development of learners from the earliest days of childhood."

The lecture will take place on Friday, April 18th at 4:00 pm in Room W1010 of the Education Sciences Library of UQAM (455 East René-Lévesque Blvd, Thérèse-Casgrain Building).

Publicity posters are available in both english and french; the lecture will be given in English.

Dr. Jacques Mehler

Early landmarks of language acquisition and crib-bilingualism

Thursday, May 8, 2008 at 2-3:30 pm
Redpath Museum Auditorium, McGill University

Dr. Jacques Mehler is head of the Language, Cognition and Development Lab at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste, Italy. He was editor in chief of Cognition until 2007, and became an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001.

Abstract

Humans are born with the ability to differentiate languages that belong to different rhythmic classes whereas four additional months are necessary to learn how to differentiate the maternal language from other languages belonging to the same rhythmic class.

After reviewing the empirical data we ask whether reaching this early landmark of language acquisition is modified by a bilingual environment. We compare infants who are confronted to two languages from birth until testing time with monolinguals in a simple binary learning task. We find that bilinguals are more advanced in domain-general executive functions. After presenting a series of experiments carried out using an eye-tracking device we draw general theoretical consequences for language acquisition.

Dr. Mehler will deliver a second lecture, "Mechanisms of language acquisition" in the (BRAMS) laboratory at Université de Montréal on Friday, May 9th at 3:00 p.m. . Please see the CRLMB events calendar for location details.

Dr. Mehler's lectures are jointly sponsored by the Centre for Research on Language, Mind and Brain (CRLMB), the Brain, Music and Sound (BRAMS) research lab and the Centre de recherche en neuropsychologie et cognition

Postdoctoral Position in Neuropsychology of Performance

This position is filled, thank you

We are currently recruiting a postdoctoral researcher to join our research team at McGill University. The successful applicant will join our team in studying brain processes that support the production of music, speech, and other auditory events. Our research uses a variety of computational, behavioral and imaging techniques for building models of sensorimotor integration, including motion capture, ERP, and formal / analytical techniques. For more information about our laboratory, please see http://www.mcgill.ca/spl/. The Sequence Production Lab is part of the Center for Research on Language, Mind and Brain (www.crlmb.ca) and the Brain, Music and Sound Research Labs (www.brams.org), and has full access to research-dedicated systems including eyetracking systems, motion tracking systems, and TMS.

The ideal candidate should have obtained Ph.D. training in music neuroscience or computational modeling of cognitive processes, with skills in experimental design and computational methods. Applicants with interests in music, speech, motor control, and memory are encouraged to apply. The postdoctoral position may be continued up to two years (subject to review after the first year). Applications will be considered as they are received, and will continue until the position is filled. The start date is flexible and can be as soon as June 1, 2008. Salary begins at $44,000 per annum. To apply, please submit by email a vita, description of research experience and interests, and contact information of three people who can provide academic references to:

Professor Caroline Palmer
Sequence Production Laboratory
Department of Psychology
McGill University
Montreal QC H3A 1B1
caroline.palmer(at)mcgill(dot)ca
tel 514-398-6128
fax 514-398-4896

Praat acoustic analysis tutorial

The CRLMB offers a tutorial on Praat acoustic analysis software, scheduled for Friday, March 7th at 10:00 a.m. Limit: 21 people. REGISTRATION IS NOW FULL.

Those with an interest in acoustic analysis are invited to a Praat software tutorial, directed by Centre AD, Dr. Lucie Ménard, and Jérôme Aubin. Praat is a popular freeware tool for recording and saving sound files, and for performing spectral, pitch, formant and intensity analyses.

For more information on Praat, please go to http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/ .

The tutorial is open to all, but CRLMB members and student members are given first preference.

The tutorial will be held in the teaching/training computer room Room 409 of the McIntyre Medical Sciences building.

Participants are asked to bring their own headphones for the computers. (mini-jack headphones, such as iPod phones, are fine)

While this tutorial will focus on Praat software, your questions about general topics in acoustic analysis are welcomed, and may help determine the format of the tutorial. Please provide your feedback and potential questions in the registration form below.

Registration:

Name:
Email Address:
Department	Select Department Dept. of Educational and Counseling Psychology Dept. of Integrated Studies in Education Department of Linguistics Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery Department of Psychology Lady Davis Institute of the JGH School of Communication Sciences and Disorders Centre de neuroscience de la cognition École d'Orthophonie et d'Audiologie
Institution	Select institution McGill UQAM Université de Montréal Concordia
Do you have other questions about acoustics (in general) that you'd like to see addressed? They may form part of this tutorial, or an additional acoustics information session may be offered.

07/08 Graduate and Postgraduate Research Day: Update

Please join the faculty and students of the CRLMB for our 07/08 Research Day, on February 5, 2008 from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. at the McGill Thomson House

CRLMB Neurolens seminar this Wednesday (Jan. 16)

As previously announced on the listserv, the first CLRMB Neurolens seminar is scheduled for Wedneday, January 16, 2008 in Room 1034, McIntyre Medical Bldg from 11:00 until 13:30.

NeuroLens is an integrated environment for the analysis and visualization of functional neuroimages. It is intended to provide extremely fast and flexible image processing, via an intuitive user interface that encourages experimentation with analysis parameters and detailed inspection of both raw image data and processing results. All processing operations in NeuroLens are built around a Plugin architecture, making it easy to extend its functionality. NeuroLens runs on Apple computers based on the G4, G5, or Intel chipsets and running MacOSX 10.4 (Tiger) or later. For more information on the software go to http://www.neurolens.org/NeuroLens/Home.html

This first seminar is a lecture overview of the Neurolens system. Subsequent seminars will include hands-on training, and answers to specific user questions.