Voici toutes les dates et salles, ainsi qu’un résumé des séminaires :

Jeudi 30/04/2026, 14h-16h, Salle du Conseil
Seminar 1. Language and the brain: a lifetime perspective.
In this first lecture I aim to give an introduction with respect to the major advances in neurolinguistic research in pathological populations over the past decades. Building on research in a series of speech and language disorders, we will discover the major neurological pinpoints of both speech and language.
Importantly, we will also go into how ageing can impact specific linguistic competences (e.g. naming abilities, use of figurative speech), and what is potentially the cause for these sometimes peculiar alterations or regressions in language use.

Mardi 05/05/2026, 10h-12h, Salle du Conseil
Seminar 2. The enigmatic cerebellum: involvement in speech and language.
The cerebellum is a neuroanatomical structure situated at the back of the brain – but hasn’t it also been in the back of our minds for too long? For many years, the cerebellum was considered a structure governing mainly gait and balance functions, even though the esteemed Gordon Holmes – as early as 1917 – already described “dysarthric” symptoms in patients with cerebellar lesions. Major neglect continued in the following decades, during which the structure was rarely seen as the principal “scapegoat” associated with speech and language (dys-)regulation – even though it only seems logical that an entity so vital for the coordination of voluntary muscle movement would, of course, be involved in speech acts. In 2009, Stoodley & Schmahmann published a study titled “Functional topography in the human cerebellum: A meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies” (NeuroImage, cited over 2,300 times),which proved to be a real game changer. The functional, motor, cognitive, aUective, and even linguistic (Stoodley & Schmahmann, 2016) mapping of the cerebellum is now widely accepted. In this presentation, I aim to provide some background on the neuroanatomy of the cerebellum, its functional topography, and an overview of how speech and language impairments can be directly and more indirectly related to cerebellar or cerebrocerebellar pathway damage.

Jeudi 28/05/2026, 14h-16h, Salle Claude Simon
Seminar 3. Aphasia across the life span : acquired childhood aphasia to primary progressive aphasia.
Aphasia is an acquired language disorder that can potentially impact all language functions and diUerent modalities (e.g., oral versus written production) to varying degrees. DiUerent types are distinguished,broadly categorized as “fluent” or “non-fluent,” which sometimes go together with very specific symptoms -e.g., grammatical disorders called agrammatism or paragrammatism. As aphasia is primarily associated with stroke and, secondly, with traumatic brain injury, the cases of aphasia usually described in the literature- and hence analyzed for (cross-)linguistic deficits – pertain to people between the ages of 50 and 80 years. Much less attention has been given to the rarer but not unseen childhood-acquired aphasias, which can occur due to intrauterine stroke, traumatic lesions, or infectious diseases. These can have a major impact, and may play a far greater role in life quality than initially thought. At the other extreme, only about two decades ago, interest began to exponentially grow in subgroups of patients with FTD (frontotemporal dementia) and AD (Alzheimer’s disease), who displayed language – not memory – issues as their first symptoms. Mesulam’s 2001 seminal paper on Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) has since instigated a line of research that is now attracting considerable attention in the neurolinguistic field. Moreover, especially in research on acquired and neurodegenerative aphasia types, research groups and networks have emphasized the need to give attention to minority or understudied languages (e.g., grammatical issues in Dutch, Turkish, and Greek will evidently diUer for typological reasons), as well as to the increasing number of bi- and multilinguals. In this lecture, I aim to provide a lifespan overview of how aphasia presents itself, with attention to linguistic diUerences, and provide special attention to the aspect of bi- and multilingualism.

Mardi 02/06/2026, 10h-12h, Salle Claude Simon
Seminar 4. Modulating language in a language dementia in mono- and bilinguals: applying transcranial direct current stimulation to the cerebellum.
Neuromodulation is increasingly being studied as a means to alter brain functioning. In this lecture, I am to provide information on a protocol that our lab used to alter cerebellar output in mono- and bilingual patients with post-stroke aphasia as well as PPA. Transcranial direct current stimulation is a, relatively aUordable, portable neurostimulation *tool, can be provide oUline (no concurrent therapy or exercise)and online (concurrent therapy or exercise) stimulation under the form cathodal (believed inhibitory) or anodal (believed excitatory) stimulation. Sham (with no sound or sensation diUerence compared to true stimulation) can be provided under a double-blind condition, allowing for good comparability in an experimental set-up. allowing for good comparability in an experimental set-up. We found promising results in our groups with, importantly, transfer effects from an
L1 to and L2 which are very much worth exploring.