Project acronym TUNINGLANG
Project Tuning Attention during Language Learning
Researcher (PI) Ruth De Diego Balaguer
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITAT DE BARCELONA
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH4, ERC-2012-StG_20111124
Summary Language is the most amazing skill that humans possess. It allows social interaction, can make us cry, laugh and transmit our most complex thoughts. Comprehending the cognitive processes involved in language learning is of critical importance for our understanding of why under certain conditions language learning is impaired. However, current language learning research has often offered limited explanations bounded within the language domain, ignoring the importance of other cognitive functions. The present project breaks these limits and presents an integrative approach at the edge of different research fields to understand the role of attention during language acquisition. Because speech is a sequence of sounds that unfold in time the present proposal integrates this long ignored temporal dimension. The aim of the project is thus to understand the involvement of the temporal orienting brain networks in language learning and how the attentional system may be tuned to the acquisition of words and rules. Three specific objectives will be fulfilled: (i) delineating the temporal attention mechanisms and brain networks involved in language learning, (ii) uncovering the developmental relationship in infants between these specific attentional mechanisms and word and rule learning, and (iii) understanding how the deficits in temporal orienting and the lesions in its brain networks may lead to similar deficits in language acquisition. This project uses a combination of novel methods allowing linking structural and functional measures (analysis of oscillatory activity following EEG variations during learning, fMRI – structural MRI white matter tractography and TMS) in different populations (brain-damaged patients, infants and healthy adults).
Summary
Language is the most amazing skill that humans possess. It allows social interaction, can make us cry, laugh and transmit our most complex thoughts. Comprehending the cognitive processes involved in language learning is of critical importance for our understanding of why under certain conditions language learning is impaired. However, current language learning research has often offered limited explanations bounded within the language domain, ignoring the importance of other cognitive functions. The present project breaks these limits and presents an integrative approach at the edge of different research fields to understand the role of attention during language acquisition. Because speech is a sequence of sounds that unfold in time the present proposal integrates this long ignored temporal dimension. The aim of the project is thus to understand the involvement of the temporal orienting brain networks in language learning and how the attentional system may be tuned to the acquisition of words and rules. Three specific objectives will be fulfilled: (i) delineating the temporal attention mechanisms and brain networks involved in language learning, (ii) uncovering the developmental relationship in infants between these specific attentional mechanisms and word and rule learning, and (iii) understanding how the deficits in temporal orienting and the lesions in its brain networks may lead to similar deficits in language acquisition. This project uses a combination of novel methods allowing linking structural and functional measures (analysis of oscillatory activity following EEG variations during learning, fMRI – structural MRI white matter tractography and TMS) in different populations (brain-damaged patients, infants and healthy adults).
Max ERC Funding
1 485 600 €
Duration
Start date: 2013-03-01, End date: 2018-02-28
Project acronym UNDER CONTROL
Project Mechanisms of cognitive control and language learning
Researcher (PI) Nuria Sebastian-Galles
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSIDAD POMPEU FABRA
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), SH4, ERC-2012-ADG_20120411
Summary We know that infants can extract regularities from the speech signal through statistical learning (SL) and that this is a fundamental mechanism in language learning. Approaches based on SL assume that statistics are automatically computed over all available input information. However, the language learning situation is so rich and multidimensional that infants need to pinpoint the appropriate subset of dimensions relevant for computing statistics. How does the baby navigate through the immense search space, being such space dependent on each language?
In this project, I will explore the relationship between mechanisms of attention and cognitive control, and language acquisition. I will approach the issue through two different strategies. First, I will analyse how possessing better mechanisms of attention and control contributes to tuning the language processing system to the environmental language’s specificities. To this end, I will start by measuring language and attention development in 11- and 30-month-old children. Then, I will evaluate language and attention in a group of adults, capitalising on the important individual differences existing in non-native speech perception. Second, I will take the opposite perspective and explore how specific language exposure (namely, bilingualism) sculpts mechanisms of cognitive control. In this research line, I will focus on how bilingual exposure alters mechanisms of attention and control in preverbal infants (of which meagre evidence exists). The project will focus on (but will not be constrained to) the way the phoneme inventory of the native language is established. Phonemes are one of the pillars of the language system that are tuned early on to the language of the environment and upon which fundamental computations are performed, yielding the discovery of words and morphosyntactic properties.
Summary
We know that infants can extract regularities from the speech signal through statistical learning (SL) and that this is a fundamental mechanism in language learning. Approaches based on SL assume that statistics are automatically computed over all available input information. However, the language learning situation is so rich and multidimensional that infants need to pinpoint the appropriate subset of dimensions relevant for computing statistics. How does the baby navigate through the immense search space, being such space dependent on each language?
In this project, I will explore the relationship between mechanisms of attention and cognitive control, and language acquisition. I will approach the issue through two different strategies. First, I will analyse how possessing better mechanisms of attention and control contributes to tuning the language processing system to the environmental language’s specificities. To this end, I will start by measuring language and attention development in 11- and 30-month-old children. Then, I will evaluate language and attention in a group of adults, capitalising on the important individual differences existing in non-native speech perception. Second, I will take the opposite perspective and explore how specific language exposure (namely, bilingualism) sculpts mechanisms of cognitive control. In this research line, I will focus on how bilingual exposure alters mechanisms of attention and control in preverbal infants (of which meagre evidence exists). The project will focus on (but will not be constrained to) the way the phoneme inventory of the native language is established. Phonemes are one of the pillars of the language system that are tuned early on to the language of the environment and upon which fundamental computations are performed, yielding the discovery of words and morphosyntactic properties.
Max ERC Funding
2 498 502 €
Duration
Start date: 2013-09-01, End date: 2019-08-31
Project acronym UNIVERSAL HEALTH
Project Engaged Universals: Ethnographic explorations of ‘Universal Health Coverage’ and the public good in Africa
Researcher (PI) Ruth Jane Prince
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITETET I OSLO
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH5, ERC-2017-STG
Summary UNIVERSAL HEALTH is an anthropological study that follows how a new global policy, Universal Health Coverage (UHC), travels and is engaged by policy-makers, bureaucrats and citizens in three African countries. Defined by the WHO as ensuring that all people can use the health services they need without financial hardship, UHC is a powerful concept that approaches public health as a matter of justice and obligation and is included in the Sustainable Development Goals. UHC is particularly important in Africa, where structural-adjustment policies undermined state capacity, promoted privatization and pushed the burden of payment onto the poor. Recent global health initiatives have done little to address the neglect of national health-care systems and citizens’ lack of trust in them. In these contexts UHC is interesting because it reinserts questions of state responsibility and the public good into health-care. Historically however, African states have only partially pursued the public good, while in practice UHC is surrounding by conflicting interests. UHC is thus not a universal model but a contested field, making it an intriguing site for anthropological research. With a focus on actors and institutions at global, national and local levels in each country, the project will explore how moves towards UHC engage relations between states and citizens and universal concepts such as the public good; how UHC intersects with formal systems of social protection; and how it influences informal social networks that support health, thus situating UHC in national histories and social practices. Tracking the frictions surrounding UHC at the levels of policy-making, implementation, among beneficiaries, and in public debate, the project will use ethnographic methodology in innovative ways through fieldwork that is multi-sited and multi-level. The project’s focus on a global policy and the public good opens new research directions and will produce knowledge of relevance beyond Africa.
Summary
UNIVERSAL HEALTH is an anthropological study that follows how a new global policy, Universal Health Coverage (UHC), travels and is engaged by policy-makers, bureaucrats and citizens in three African countries. Defined by the WHO as ensuring that all people can use the health services they need without financial hardship, UHC is a powerful concept that approaches public health as a matter of justice and obligation and is included in the Sustainable Development Goals. UHC is particularly important in Africa, where structural-adjustment policies undermined state capacity, promoted privatization and pushed the burden of payment onto the poor. Recent global health initiatives have done little to address the neglect of national health-care systems and citizens’ lack of trust in them. In these contexts UHC is interesting because it reinserts questions of state responsibility and the public good into health-care. Historically however, African states have only partially pursued the public good, while in practice UHC is surrounding by conflicting interests. UHC is thus not a universal model but a contested field, making it an intriguing site for anthropological research. With a focus on actors and institutions at global, national and local levels in each country, the project will explore how moves towards UHC engage relations between states and citizens and universal concepts such as the public good; how UHC intersects with formal systems of social protection; and how it influences informal social networks that support health, thus situating UHC in national histories and social practices. Tracking the frictions surrounding UHC at the levels of policy-making, implementation, among beneficiaries, and in public debate, the project will use ethnographic methodology in innovative ways through fieldwork that is multi-sited and multi-level. The project’s focus on a global policy and the public good opens new research directions and will produce knowledge of relevance beyond Africa.
Max ERC Funding
1 484 797 €
Duration
Start date: 2018-09-01, End date: 2023-08-31
Project acronym VOICE
Project """Hearing voices"" - From cognition to brain systems"
Researcher (PI) Kenneth Hugdahl
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITETET I BERGEN
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), SH4, ERC-2009-AdG
Summary The experience of "hearing voices", i. e. auditory hallucinations in the absence of an external acoustic input is a perplexing phenomenon. In addition to being a defining characteristic of schizophrenia, experiences of "hearing voices" may be more common in the general population than what we normally think, which poses a theoretical challenge from a neuropsychological point of view. The overall goal is to track auditory hallucinations from the cognitive (phenomenological) to the neuronal (brain systems and synaptic) levels of explanation, by drawing on my previous research on hemispheric asymmetry and attention-modulation of dichotic listening and functional neuroimaging. I now suggest a new model for explaining "hearing voices" in patients and in healthy individuals. From the phenomenology of what patients and healthy individuals "hearing voices" actually report led me to question current models and theories that auditory hallucinations are "inner speech" or "traumatic memories". Since both patients and healthy individuals "hearing voices" subjectively report experiencing someone "speaking to them" it seems that a perceptual model would better fit the actual phenomenology. A perceptual model can however not explain why patients and healthy individuals differ in the way they cope with and interpret the "voice". An expanded model is therefore advanced that sees auditory hallucinations as a break-down of the dynamic interplay between bottom-up (perceptual) and top-down (inhibitory control) cognitive processes. It is suggested that while both groups show deficient perceptual processing, the patients in addition have impaired inhibitory control functions which prevents them from interpreting the "voices" as coming from inner thought processes. A series of experiments are proposed to test the model.
Summary
The experience of "hearing voices", i. e. auditory hallucinations in the absence of an external acoustic input is a perplexing phenomenon. In addition to being a defining characteristic of schizophrenia, experiences of "hearing voices" may be more common in the general population than what we normally think, which poses a theoretical challenge from a neuropsychological point of view. The overall goal is to track auditory hallucinations from the cognitive (phenomenological) to the neuronal (brain systems and synaptic) levels of explanation, by drawing on my previous research on hemispheric asymmetry and attention-modulation of dichotic listening and functional neuroimaging. I now suggest a new model for explaining "hearing voices" in patients and in healthy individuals. From the phenomenology of what patients and healthy individuals "hearing voices" actually report led me to question current models and theories that auditory hallucinations are "inner speech" or "traumatic memories". Since both patients and healthy individuals "hearing voices" subjectively report experiencing someone "speaking to them" it seems that a perceptual model would better fit the actual phenomenology. A perceptual model can however not explain why patients and healthy individuals differ in the way they cope with and interpret the "voice". An expanded model is therefore advanced that sees auditory hallucinations as a break-down of the dynamic interplay between bottom-up (perceptual) and top-down (inhibitory control) cognitive processes. It is suggested that while both groups show deficient perceptual processing, the patients in addition have impaired inhibitory control functions which prevents them from interpreting the "voices" as coming from inner thought processes. A series of experiments are proposed to test the model.
Max ERC Funding
2 281 572 €
Duration
Start date: 2010-07-01, End date: 2015-06-30
Project acronym WINK
Project Women's Invisible Ink: Trans-Genre Writing and the Gendering of Intellectual Value in Early Modernity
Researcher (PI) Carmen FONT PAZ
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITAT AUTONOMA DE BARCELONA
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH5, ERC-2018-STG
Summary Literature scholars have succeeded in recovering texts by early modern women from different languages, genres, and sociopolitical contexts. Still, compared to their male counterparts, few women writers feature in national canons, or they compose a separate set of ‘early modern women writers’. A nuanced qualitative approach to their textual production reveals forms of self-taught, intellectually-minded trans-genre discourse (traversing poetry, drama, prose, novels) traditionally deemed irrelevant as it did not conform to a practice of scholarly male-dominated discourse. Thus, much original thinking by women has remained intact even if their texts are available to us.
The proposed research locates, identifies and examines the invisible written production of women in early European modernity in order to modify the single-gender paradigm of intellectual value. It surveys sources in six languages through a methodology based on trans-genre writing rather than on close genre types, allowing patterns of persuasive argumentation to emerge as intellectual input, while exposing the rhetorical models that have impinged on the social and cognitive processes identifying intellectual value as being androcentric.
The main research unfolds in three strands: 1) Synergies, examining religious and life-writing themes that shaped into ethical discourses on the common good. 2) Cloud intertextualities, tracing fragmented chains of intuitive argument in discursive narrative. 3) Textual porosity, understanding patterns of knowledge transference and authorial attribution in the management of sources.
The research outcomes will render co-authored articles, a virtual space environment as the reservoir and task field for comparative textual analysis, and a four-volume collection on the cultural history of textual misogyny. WINK approaches intellectual value as a category of gender analysis, bringing to light transformative thinking from understudied and underrepresented women authors.
Summary
Literature scholars have succeeded in recovering texts by early modern women from different languages, genres, and sociopolitical contexts. Still, compared to their male counterparts, few women writers feature in national canons, or they compose a separate set of ‘early modern women writers’. A nuanced qualitative approach to their textual production reveals forms of self-taught, intellectually-minded trans-genre discourse (traversing poetry, drama, prose, novels) traditionally deemed irrelevant as it did not conform to a practice of scholarly male-dominated discourse. Thus, much original thinking by women has remained intact even if their texts are available to us.
The proposed research locates, identifies and examines the invisible written production of women in early European modernity in order to modify the single-gender paradigm of intellectual value. It surveys sources in six languages through a methodology based on trans-genre writing rather than on close genre types, allowing patterns of persuasive argumentation to emerge as intellectual input, while exposing the rhetorical models that have impinged on the social and cognitive processes identifying intellectual value as being androcentric.
The main research unfolds in three strands: 1) Synergies, examining religious and life-writing themes that shaped into ethical discourses on the common good. 2) Cloud intertextualities, tracing fragmented chains of intuitive argument in discursive narrative. 3) Textual porosity, understanding patterns of knowledge transference and authorial attribution in the management of sources.
The research outcomes will render co-authored articles, a virtual space environment as the reservoir and task field for comparative textual analysis, and a four-volume collection on the cultural history of textual misogyny. WINK approaches intellectual value as a category of gender analysis, bringing to light transformative thinking from understudied and underrepresented women authors.
Max ERC Funding
1 489 550 €
Duration
Start date: 2019-03-01, End date: 2024-02-29
Project acronym WOMENART
Project "Reassessing the Roles of Women as ""Makers"" of Medieval Art and Architecture"
Researcher (PI) Therese Marie Martin
Host Institution (HI) AGENCIA ESTATAL CONSEJO SUPERIOR DEINVESTIGACIONES CIENTIFICAS
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH5, ERC-2010-StG_20091209
Summary This study addresses the question of medieval women's participation in the production and consumption of art and architecture. As patrons and facilitators, producers and artists, owners and recipients, women's overall involvement in the process is investigated within specific social and political contexts, examining interactions and collaborations (or confrontations) with men. A new point of departure will be to refocus on the terminology used in the Middle Ages, particularly the verb 'to make'. For artist and patron is a false dichotomy, or, at the least, a modern one. The verb employed most often in medieval inscriptions from paintings to embroideries to buildings is 'made' (fecit). This word denotes at times the individual whose hands produced the work, but it can equally refer to the person whose donation made the undertaking possible. Whereas today's eye separates patron from artist, the medieval view recognized both as makers. A most challenging aspect of this project comes from its transverse nature as a study of Christian, Islamic, Jewish and secular works. Just as these cultures were interrelated in the Middle Ages, to understand them today they must be examined as part of an overall milieu. What I propose is a new way of thinking about the history of art and architecture from the Middle Ages, one that does not automatically assume it to be by and for men but recognizes the contributions of women while situating them firmly within their historical contexts.
Summary
This study addresses the question of medieval women's participation in the production and consumption of art and architecture. As patrons and facilitators, producers and artists, owners and recipients, women's overall involvement in the process is investigated within specific social and political contexts, examining interactions and collaborations (or confrontations) with men. A new point of departure will be to refocus on the terminology used in the Middle Ages, particularly the verb 'to make'. For artist and patron is a false dichotomy, or, at the least, a modern one. The verb employed most often in medieval inscriptions from paintings to embroideries to buildings is 'made' (fecit). This word denotes at times the individual whose hands produced the work, but it can equally refer to the person whose donation made the undertaking possible. Whereas today's eye separates patron from artist, the medieval view recognized both as makers. A most challenging aspect of this project comes from its transverse nature as a study of Christian, Islamic, Jewish and secular works. Just as these cultures were interrelated in the Middle Ages, to understand them today they must be examined as part of an overall milieu. What I propose is a new way of thinking about the history of art and architecture from the Middle Ages, one that does not automatically assume it to be by and for men but recognizes the contributions of women while situating them firmly within their historical contexts.
Max ERC Funding
1 200 000 €
Duration
Start date: 2010-12-01, End date: 2015-11-30
