Catégorie d'événements : Séminaires

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ces 50 années ont été dédiées à la recherche en phonétique et phonologie, ainsi qu’à leurs retombées dans les domaines cliniques, de l’enseignement des langues, de la typologie et du traitement automatique de la parole.

Dans la lignée de l’Institut de Phonétique fondé en 1911 à la Sorbonne, le Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie perpétue les travaux de personnalités éminentes telles que Ferdinand Brunot, Pierre Fouché, Marguerite Durand, Georges Nick Clements et bien d’autres qui ont contribué à son héritage.

L’événement du 50e anniversaire du Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie sera l’occasion de retracer cette histoire, de souligner les moments marquants de notre parcours de recherche, et de mettre en lumière les multiples facettes de nos recherches actuelles qui contribuent au progrès dans notre domaine.

Retrouvez le programme en cliquant sur ce lien.

Especially for impaired speech, the concept of articulatory undershoot and overshoot is important allowing for different degrees of temporal and spatial modulations. However, it can be difficult to
determine whether the speech output is the direct result of a perturbated speech system or learnt compensatory strategies in speakers with chronic motor speech impairments due to neurological
conditions (Mücke et al. 2014; Thies et al 2021). The discrepancies between the empirical-based movement contours and modelled predictions exemplify the vast challenges when trying to map
phonetic contours to phonological forms. I will compare the effects of healthy aging and Parkinson’s disease on speech motor performance. In addition, I will conclude that the speech system seems to be affected by age and disease but speakers develop compensatory strategies.

Prosody, the rhythmic and tonal organization of speech, plays an integral role in communication. I will discuss, how categorical and gradient changes can be understood as the scaling of one control parameter modulating different prosodic dimensions at the same time and how modulations can change in relative importance when investigating different speaking styles, such as loud and habitual speech (Roessig & Mücke 2019; Pagel et al. 2021). From a methodological perspective, I will also demonstrate the relative importance of acoustic and articulatory variables conducted on a dataset on focus marking in German and relate the results to the question of errors in the interpretation of phonetic data (Mücke et al. 2020).

The dynamical systems theory has been applied to the coordination of e.g., limb movements (finger, arm, legs) and has been extended to linguistic theory (Haken et al. 1985). An important component of dynamical systems is the concept of point attractors, which are stable states in the continuous phase space the system travels towards. I will showcase how these attractors help to understand the variability in speech output and its relation to linguistic functions, e.g., when investigating sound change, phonological alternations or prosodic prominence on the segmental and intonational tiers (Browman & Goldstein 1986; Gafos & Benus 2006; Roessig & Mücke 2019).

Lectures 3-4: Contrast and Dispersion in Handshapes in a Village Sign Language

We provide an analysis of the distribution of handshapes on the dominant and non-dominant hand in the incipient village sign language found in the Maxakal´ı community in Brazil. The most frequent handshapes reflect tendencies in choosing from the crosslinguistically unmarked set of handshapes, and are particularly well-suited to quantitative analyses of handshape complexity found in models such as Ann (2006) and Brentari (2003), in addition to favouring a core set chosen from the most maximally dispersed handshapes. This in fact suggests that emergent sign languages, no matter how young, show quantitative correlations between token frequency and articulatory complexity, despite tendencies that they may have otherwise to be iconically referential. We demonstrate that these trends hold for the non-dominant hand as well, an element of sign language phonologies with no analogue in the spoken domain. Finally, we demonstrate how allophonic thumb extension can be understood as contrast enhancement in signed languages, leading to a visual analogue of acoustic prominence.

Lectures 3-4: Contrast and Dispersion in Handshapes in a Village Sign Language

We provide an analysis of the distribution of handshapes on the dominant and non-dominant hand in the incipient village sign language found in the Maxakal´ı community in Brazil. The most frequent handshapes reflect tendencies in choosing from the crosslinguistically unmarked set of handshapes, and are particularly well-suited to quantitative analyses of handshape complexity found in models such as Ann (2006) and Brentari (2003), in addition to favouring a core set chosen from the most maximally dispersed handshapes. This in fact suggests that emergent sign languages, no matter how young, show quantitative correlations between token frequency and articulatory complexity, despite tendencies that they may have otherwise to be iconically referential. We demonstrate that these trends hold for the non-dominant hand as well, an element of sign language phonologies with no analogue in the spoken domain. Finally, we demonstrate how allophonic thumb extension can be understood as contrast enhancement in signed languages, leading to a visual analogue of acoustic prominence.