Current Distinguished Lecture Series

Updated information on Distinguished Lectures, as well as other talks, events and seminars organized by the CRLMB are currently available on the McGill events calendar as well as on the calendar section of this site.

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.

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]

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.

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

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

Dr. Sheila Blumstein

Phonetic category structure and the mapping of sound structure to the lexicon: Evidence from lesion studies and functional neuroimaging

Friday, April 4, 2008 at 1:30 pm -3:30 pm
Room 1034, McIntyre Medical Building, 1200 av des Pins ouest

Dr. Sheila Blumstein is a an Alfred D. Mead Professor of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences at Brown University

Abstract

The processes underlying both speaking and understanding appear to be easy and seamless. And yet, speech input is highly variable, the lexical form of a word shares its sound shape with many other words in the lexicon, and often a given word will have multiple meanings. The goal of this research is to examine how and in what ways the neural system is, on the one hand, sensitive to the variability in the speech and lexical processing system, and, on the other, is able to resolve this variability in determining phonetic category membership, lexical form, and word meaning. Evidence from studies of aphasia and functional neuroimaging will be examined with particular focus on categorical perception of speech, lexical competition, and meaning ambiguity in words. Results suggest that the processing of speech and lexical form recruits a distributed neural system that includes temporal, parietal, and frontal structures, and the processing of word meaning recruits temporal and frontal structures. The inferior frontal gyrus appears to play a domain general role across levels of the linguistic grammar in resolving variability not only of phonetic structure but also of phonological, lexical, and meaning competition.