<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><br><div><br><div>Begin forwarded message:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" color="#000000" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; color: #000000"><b>From: </b></font><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Morgan Sonderegger <<a href="mailto:morgan@cs.uchicago.edu">morgan@cs.uchicago.edu</a>></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" color="#000000" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; color: #000000"><b>Date: </b></font><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">December 2, 2008 12:01:34 PM CST</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" color="#000000" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; color: #000000"><b>To: </b></font><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica"><a href="mailto:uclinguist@listhost.uchicago.edu">uclinguist@listhost.uchicago.edu</a>, <a href="mailto:ling-grads@listhost.uchicago.edu">ling-grads@listhost.uchicago.edu</a>, <a href="mailto:phd-students@mailman.cs.uchicago.edu">phd-students@mailman.cs.uchicago.edu</a>, <a href="mailto:faculty@mailman.cs.uchicago.edu">faculty@mailman.cs.uchicago.edu</a>, <a href="mailto:psych-faculty@listhost.uchicago.edu">psych-faculty@listhost.uchicago.edu</a>, <a href="mailto:psych-grad@listhost.uchicago.edu">psych-grad@listhost.uchicago.edu</a>, <a href="mailto:psych-friends@listhost.uchicago.edu">psych-friends@listhost.uchicago.edu</a>, <a href="mailto:psych-postdoc@listhost.uchicago.edu">psych-postdoc@listhost.uchicago.edu</a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" color="#000000" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; color: #000000"><b>Subject: </b></font><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica"><b>[Faculty] 12/5 at 3:30: Workshop on Language, Cognition, and Computation: STEVEN SMALL</b></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><br></div> </div><div>Workshop on Language, Cognition, and Computation<br>Sponsored by the Council on Advanced Studies<br><br>We are pleased to announce a talk by:<br><br>STEVEN SMALL<br>(Neuroscience, University of Chicago)<br><br>Friday, December 5, at 3:30pm, in the Karen Landahl Center (basement of <br>Social Science)<br><br>This is the fourth meeting of a year-long workshop series on Language, <br>Cognition, and Computation, with a particular focus on language learning <br>and language change. Meetings are held on Fridays 3-4 times monthly. <br>Each meeting features a presentation, followed by discussion.<br><br>We have a number of exciting speakers lined up for this series, both <br>local and from abroad. The current list and meeting schedule, together <br>with further information about the workshop, can be found at: <br><a href="http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/language/">http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/language/</a><br><br>If you are interested in presenting recent research as part of this <br>series, please email one of us (listed below). Graduate students of any <br>department are especially invited!<br><br>Any persons with a disability who believe they might need assistance in <br>attending the workshops are asked to contact Morgan Sonderegger in <br>advance at morgan@cs.uchicago.edu.<br><br>Abstract:<br>------<br><br>"The Biology of Face-to-Face Communication: Action Understanding and <br>Language"<br>Steven L. Small, The University of Chicago<br><br>An important source of information for language comprehension comes from <br>the perception of action, including the movements of the mouth and <br>hands. The neural interactions involved in processing this information <br>involve the premotor cortex, the inferior parietal lobule, and the <br>superior temporal gyrus. These regions and the neural connections among <br>them comprise a human system for observation-execution matching that <br>appears to have a phylogenetic basis in the "mirror neuron" system of <br>the macaque. It appears that this system operates in part by covert <br>simulation of perceived action. In this talk, we present data from <br>several studies of audiovisual language comprehension that support this <br>thesis. First we discuss the role of action understanding in speech <br>perception, and show how it aids phonological disambiguation across <br>environmental and contextual variation, and that the motor cortex plays <br>a fundamental role in the process. We also show evidence for the <br>existence of abstract neural codes for speech percepts that are <br>independent of their auditory or visual components. In the second part <br>of the talk, we discuss the role of action understanding in higher order <br>language comprehension. We conclude that the process of understanding <br>language involves multimodal sensory processing, motor simulation, and <br>processing of derived abstract representations, which collectively form <br>a distributed circuit encoding comprehension.<br><br><br><br><br>Sincerely,<br>-- <br>Morgan Sonderegger, Student Coordinator, Computer Science<br>Jason Riggle, Faculty Co-Sponsor, Linguistics<br>Alan Yu, Faculty Co-Sponsor, Linguistics<br>Partha Niyogi, Faculty Co-Sponsor, Computer Science<br>_______________________________________________<br>faculty mailing list - faculty@mailman.cs.uchicago.edu<br>https://mailman.cs.uchicago.edu/mailman/listinfo/faculty<br><br></div></blockquote></div><br></body></html>