Séminaire Lpl - Cerebral encoding of constituent structures - 24 février 2012

Séminaire Lpl :

CEREBRAL ENCODING OF CONSTITUENT STRUCTURES

Christophe Pallier & Chotiga Pattamadilok

Unité de Neuroimagerie Cognitive INSERM-CEA, Laboratoire Parole et Langage

24 février 2012

• Lieu / location/notice : Salle des conférences • Conditions d'accès : entrée libre • Info : http://www.pallier.org/w/index.php

Following the rationale that the activation of brain regions encoding syntactic constituents should increase with their size, we invented a new experimental paradigm where participants are scanned with functional magnetic resonance while reading or listening to sequences words that can be parsed into more or less large phrases.  We observed several temporal and frontal regions to be sensitive to the complexity of constituents. Using delexicalised strings, we identified the regions that are specifically involved in the representation of constituent structure. An analogous experiment with music will also be described, which aimed to compare the neural substrate involved in processing musical and linguistic structures (Christophe Pallier).

In the second part of the talk, we will present a new fMRI experiment that aims at obtaining converging evidence for the brain regions involved in constituent structure. To do so, we use a priming paradigm, a method similar to decoding in affording sophisticated inferences as to the generality of the underlying neural code. 

Generally, the neural response is reduced when a stimulus is repeated, a phenomenon called repetition suppression.  By presenting target sentences that coincide or not with the constituent of prime sentences, we expect a reduction of the activation in the regions that process syntax only when the target sentences correspond to the constituents presented in the primes (Chotiga Pattamadilok).

Christophe Pallier :  Psycholinguiste, Directeur de recherche CNRS, Unité de Neuroimagerie Cognitive INSERM-CEA, Centre Neurospin, Saclay, France. Domaines de recherche: perception de la parole, bilinguisme, analyse syntaxique

Chotiga Pattamadilok : Psycholinguiste, Titulaire d’un doctorat en Sciences Psychologiques de l’Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgique, Chargée de Recherche au CNRS. Domaines de recherche : Litératie, l’influence de l’apprentissage de la lecture sur le traitement de la parole.

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