[Swift-devel] Fwd: [Faculty] 12/5 at 3:30: Workshop on Language, Cognition, and Computation: STEVEN SMALL

[Ian Foster]

Begin forwarded message:

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

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