ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

Proposal summary: The present project will investigate the main principles of development and neuroplasticity in humans in the domain of multisensory processes (the interplay between sensory systems). It will be tested how learning plasticity of the human brain changes from childhood to adulthood and how early experience constraints neuroplasticity at later developmental stages as well as in adults. The project is based upon animal findings in sensory development and plasticity. Both a prospective (studies in children) and a retrospective (studies in people with a history of visual or auditory deprivation) approach are employed. Behavioural paradigms from experimental psychology addressing multisensory processes are combined with electroencephalographic recordings (EEG). First, we investigate the functional principles and neural correlates of multisensory development. Second, we investigate multisensory processes in people who suffered from a transient phase of sensory deprivation after birth: (a) in people who were born with bilateral dense cataracts that were removed later, and (b) in congenitally deaf individuals, who were equipped with a cochlear implant to restore hearing. This line of research will reveal the critical contribution of single sensory systems as well as the synchronized input across modalities with regard to the emergence of successful multisensory binding. Third, we will investigate whether it is possible to alleviate neural changes demarcating the end of sensitive phases or critical periods by implementing an incremental training procedure. Last, we will look at whether experimentally induced transient sensory deprivation increases neuroplasticity loss during a sensitive phase or critical period. We are convinced that basic research, such as the present, will reveal important principles of development and neuroplasticity which will be useful in applied setting to improve education, the rehabilitation of individuals with sensory defects and the treatment of developmental disorders.

2 396 640 €

Start date: 2010-12-01, End date: 2016-11-30

This project aims to develop a theoretical account of the mind that acknowledges its embodied as well as emotional character, thus cutting across traditional dichotomies such as head/body, reason/passion, intellect/instinct, and nurture/nature. This goal involves bringing together two research fields that have paid relatively little attention to each other the embodied approach in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, and the emerging field of affective science . Both fields have undergone considerable developments in the last years, and both represent thriving interdisciplinary research areas. The proposed framework will detail the various ways in which the embodied and emotional features of the mind relate to one another, including the implications that an embodied-emotional view of the mind will have for our concepts of consciousness, value, and rationality. The project is divided into four interrelated yet distinct self-contained subprojects that will be completed over a period of five years. Subproject 1 will address the question of the nature of emotion experience and its relation to the body through an analysis of accounts of lived experience found in philosophical phenomenology, psychology and neuroscience. Subproject 2 will discuss the possibility to extend emotions beyond the boundary of the organism. Subproject 3 will develop an embodied account of value, from simple to more complex organisms. Subproject 4 will elaborate the implications of an embodied-emotional view of the mind for philosophical conceptions of control, rationality, and normativity. Overall, these themes outline a project which is philosophical in its aims (the development of a theoretical framework, and the philosophical implications of such a framework), and interdisciplinary in its methodology. Part of it will in fact examine and discuss various psychological and neuroscientific studies in detail, and recommend new avenues for empirical research in these disciplines.

685 301 €

Start date: 2010-01-01, End date: 2014-12-31

From the late '50s until the early '70s, theoretical linguistics, computational linguistics, and psycholinguistics, were united by a common model based on Chomskian transformational generative grammar formalism. This consensus fell apart in the later 70s, because of disagreements about the role of semantics. Formal syntax has abandoned semantics and any interest in formal constraint. Semantically based functional and cognitive theories of grammar are agnostic about formalism. Current psycholinguistic theories mainly ignore formal linguistic theory, while in computational linguistics, the dominant models are generally low-level finite-state or context-free systems that are known to to be incomplete with respect to the full range of of human language. While the latter methods, aided by machine-learning, have made considerable progress in practical applications such as automatic speech recognition, machine translation, and parsing, they place inherent limits on performance that are already yielding near-asymptotic performance in some applications. The aim of the proposal is to restore grammatical theory to its necessary place in the theory of human language behaviour, by providing a more restricted theory of constructions than others on offer. This formalism is both efficiently parsable, and expressive enough to support semantic interpretation. The project seeks both to establish the explanatory adequacy of the theory in linguistic terms, and to generalize existing treebank-based computational models derived by supervised learning methods. It uses unsupervised and semi-supervised methods based on unlabeled data. A crucial component will be a fully articulated Natural Semantics closely related to the surface grammar, supporting entailment directly.

1 910 998 €

Start date: 2010-06-01, End date: 2015-05-31

Informal conversation is the primary context for all central processes of language. Yet it is the least studied. The many advances of traditional linguistic typology the systematic comparison of the world s languages have been based on 'isolated sentences' as data. This project will meet the challenge of working with rich conversational data. This stands to permanently remedy our skewed linguistic understanding by pioneering a systematic approach to the comparison of *language use*, to complement the comparison of language structure. This not only forges a new field of comparative linguistics, it opens up new questions of language and mind. Within mind , we include the high-order social intelligence that defines being human: our human sociality . This project will use data from social interaction to show that language is a window onto the *social mind*. A team of 6 will work on 7 languages (English, and 2 languages of Asia, Africa, and S. America), toward 3 project objectives. Objective 1 is collection of corpora of video-recorded conversation in the field. Objective 2, drawing on these corpora, is a systematic description of three defined systems in each language: (1) *repair* (of problems in speaking and understanding), (2) *reference*, and (3) *requests* (using language to get others to do things). Each system provides a window onto core aspects of human sociality: The project will focus on the relation between informational imperatives (common knowledge and perspectives) and affiliational imperatives (matters of face and social manipulation). Objective 3, drawing on Objective 2, is a detailed coding and quantitative comparison of the 3 systems across the 7 languages. This systematic comparison of systems of language use will do two things: 1. set the agenda for a new tradition in linguistics a *typology of language use* and 2. bring new evidence to bear upon interdisciplinary questions of the nature and cultural variability of human sociality.

1 999 800 €

Start date: 2010-01-01, End date: 2014-12-31