ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

I intend to investigate what cognitive mechanisms give us combinatorial speech. Combinatorial speech is the ability to make new words using pre-existing speech sounds. Humans are the only apes that can do this, yet we do not know how our brains do it, nor how exactly we differ from other apes. Using new experimental techniques to study human behavior and new computational techniques to model human cognition, I will find out how we deal with combinatorial speech. The experimental part will study individual and cultural learning. Experimental cultural learning is a new technique that simulates cultural evolution in the laboratory. Two types of cultural learning will be used: iterated learning, which simulates language transfer across generations, and social coordination, which simulates emergence of norms in a language community. Using the two types of cultural learning together with individual learning experiments will help to zero in, from three angles, on how humans deal with combinatorial speech. In addition it will make a methodological contribution by comparing the strengths and weaknesses of the three methods. The computer modeling part will formalize hypotheses about how our brains deal with combinatorial speech. Two models will be built: a high-level model that will establish the basic algorithms with which combinatorial speech is learned and reproduced, and a neural model that will establish in more detail how the algorithms are implemented in the brain. In addition, the models, through increasing understanding of how humans deal with speech, will help bridge the performance gap between human and computer speech recognition. The project will advance science in four ways: it will provide insight into how our unique ability for using combinatorial speech works, it will tell us how this is implemented in the brain, it will extend the novel methodology of experimental cultural learning and it will create new computer models for dealing with human speech.

1 276 620 €

Start date: 2012-02-01, End date: 2017-01-31

My proposal seeks to explain the complex interplay between genetic and environmental causes of individual variation in substance use and the risk for abuse. Substance use is common. Substances like nicotine and cannabis have well-known negative health consequences, while alcohol and caffeine use may be both beneficial and detrimental, depending on quantity and frequency of use. Twin studies (including my own) demonstrated that both heritable and environmental factors play a role. My proposal on substance use (nicotine, alcohol, cannabis and caffeine) is organized around several key objectives: 1. To unravel the complex contribution of genetic and environmental factors to substance use by using extended twin family designs; 2. To identify and confirm genes and gene networks involved in substance use by using DNA-variant data; 3. To explore gene expression patterns with RNA data in substance users versus non-users; 4. To investigate biomarkers in substance users versus non-users using blood or urine; 5. To unravel relation between substance use and health by linking twin-family data to national medical databases. To realize these aims I will use the extensive resources of the Netherlands Twin Register (NTR); including both the longitudinal phenotype database and the biological samples. I have been involved in data collection, coordination of data collection and analyzing NTR data since 1999. With my comprehensive experience in data collection, data analyses and my knowledge in the field of behavior genetics and addiction research I will be able to successfully lead this cutting-edge project. Additional data crucial for the project will be collected by my team. Large samples will be available for this study and state-of-the art methods will be used to analyze the data. All together, my project will offer powerful approaches to unravel the complex interaction between genetic and environmental causes of individual differences in substance use and the risk for abuse.

1 491 964 €

Start date: 2011-12-01, End date: 2017-05-31

Most historians work in archives, but generally have not made archives into their primary object of research. While we tend to be preoccupied by documentary loss, what is striking is the sheer amount of paperwork preserved over the centuries. We need to study the reasons for this preservation. This project wishes to study the history of the archives and of the chanceries that oversaw their production storage and organization in late medieval and early modern Italy: essentially from the creation of the first chanceries in city-states in the late twelfth century to the opening of the Archivi di Stato that, after the ancient states’ dissolution, preserved documents as tools for scholarship rather than administration. Because of its fragmented political history, concentrating on Italy means having access to the archives of a wide variety of regimes; in turn, as institutions pursuing similar functions, archives lend themselves to comparison and therefore such research may help us overcome the traditional disconnectedness in the study of Italy’s past. The project proposes to break significantly new ground, first, by adopting a comparative approach through the in-depth analysis of seven case studies and, second, by contextualising the study of archives away from institutional history in a wider social and cultural context, by focusing on six themes researched in six successive phases: 1) the political role of archives, and the efforts devoted by governments to their development; 2) their organization, subdivisions, referencing systems; 3) the material culture of documents and physical repositories as well as spatial locations; 4) the social characteristiscs of the staff; 5) the archives’ place in society, including their access and misuse; 6) their use by historians. As implied in the choice of these themes, the project is deliberately interdisciplinary, and aims at the mutually beneficial exchange between archivists, social, political cultural and art historians.

1 107 070 €

Start date: 2012-02-01, End date: 2016-07-31

This project intends to study intercultural connections in contemporary Europe, engaging both native and ‘new’ Europeans. These connections are woven through the faculties of embodied subjects – memory, visuality and mobility – and concern the movement of people, ideas and images across the borders of European nation-states. These faculties are connected with that of affect, an increasingly important concept in history and the social sciences. Memory will be understood not only as oral or direct memory, but also as cultural memory, embodied in various cultural products. Our study aims to understand new forms of European identity, as these develop in an increasingly diasporic world. Europe today is not only a key site of immigration, after having been for centuries an area of emigration, but also a crucial point of arrival in a global network designed by mobile human beings. Three parts will make up the project. The first will engage with bodies, their gendered dimension, performative capacities and connection to place. It will explore the ways certain bodies are ‘emplaced’ as ‘European’, while others are marked as alien, and contrast these discourses with the counter-narratives by visual artists. The second part will extend further the reflection on the role of the visual arts in challenging an emergent ‘Fortress Europe’ but also in re-imagining the memory of European colonialism. The work of some key artists will be shown to students in Italy and the Netherlands, both recent migrants and ‘natives’, creating an ‘induced reception’. The final part of the project will look at alternative imaginations of Europe, investigating the oral memories and ‘mental maps’ created by two migrant communities in Europe: from Peru and from the Horn of Africa. Examining the heterogeneous micro-productions of mobility – whether ‘real’ or imagined/envisioned – will thus yield important lessons for the historical understanding of inclusion and exclusion in today’s Europe.

1 488 501 €

Start date: 2013-06-01, End date: 2018-05-31

Learning to read is probably one of the most exciting discoveries in our life. Using a longitudinal approach, the research proposed examines how the human brain responds to two major challenges: (a) the instantiation a complex cognitive function for which there is no genetic blueprint (learning to read in a first language, L1), and (b) the accommodation to new statistical regularities when learning to read in a second language (L2). The aim of the present research project is to identify the neural substrates of the reading process and its constituent cognitive components, with specific attention to individual differences and reading disabilities; as well as to investigate the relationship between specific cognitive functions and the changes in neural activity that take place in the course of learning to read in L1 and in L2. The project will employ a longitudinal design. We will recruit children before they learn to read in L1 and in L2 and track reading development with both cognitive and neuroimaging measures over 24 months. The findings from this project will provide a deeper understanding of (a) how general neurocognitive factors and language specific factors underlie individual differences – and reading disabilities– in reading acquisition in L1 and in L2; (b) how the neuro-cognitive circuitry changes and brain mechanisms synchronize while instantiating reading in L1 and in L2; (c) what the limitations and the extent of brain plasticity are in young readers. An interdisciplinary and multi-methodological approach is one of the keys to success of the present project, along with strong theory-driven investigation. By combining both we will generate breakthroughs to advance our understanding of how literacy in L1 and in L2 is acquired and mastered. The research proposed will also lay the foundations for more applied investigations of best practice in teaching reading in first and subsequent languages, and devising intervention methods for reading disabilities.

2 487 000 €

Start date: 2012-05-01, End date: 2017-04-30

"During their first year of life, infants become attuned to the phonemes, words and phonological rules of their language, with little or no adult supervision. After 30 years of accumulated experimental results, we are still lacking an account for the puzzling fact that these 3 interdependent components of language are acquired not sequentially, but in parallel. Drawing tools from Machine Learning and Automatic Speech Recognition, we construct a model of this early process, test it on 2 large spontaneous speech databases (Japanese, French and Dutch) and test its predictions in infants using behavioral, EEGs and fNIRS techniques. 1. Coding. We study different ways of defining coding features for speech, from fine-grained to coarse grained, in view of the automatic discovery of a hierarchy of linguistic units. We compare this with a systematic study of the units of speech coding as they unfold in 6, 9 and 12 month old infants.. 2. Lexicon. Infants recognize some words before they know the phonemes of their language; we modify existing word segmentation algorithms so they can work on raw speech. We test the unique prediction that infants start with a large lexicon that’s quite different from the adult one. 3. Rules. Phonemes are produced as overlapping, coarticulated gestures. To untangle these context effects, we use a predictive model of coarticulation in auditory space and invert it. We test when and how infants perform reverse coarticulation. 4. Integration. The above subprojects provide only an initial bootstrapping into approximate phonemes, words, and contextual rules. We show how to iteratively integrate these approximate representations to derive better ones. The outcome will be numerically assessed on an adult directed and infant directed speech database, and compared to those of to state-of-the-art supervized phoneme recognizers. The predictions will be tested in infants learning artificial languages and in a longitudinal study."

2 194 557 €

Start date: 2012-11-01, End date: 2017-10-31

Thanks to the recent advances in mapping brain activation during task performance using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (i.e., studying the brain in action), it is now possible to study one of the oldest questions in psychology: how the development of neural circuitry underlies the development of cognition and emotion. The ‘Storm and Stress’ of adolescence, a period during which adolescents develop cognitively with great speed but are also risk-takers and sensitive to opinions of their peer group, has puzzled scientists for centuries. New technologies of brain mapping have the potential to shed new light on the mystery of adolescence. The approach proposed here concerns the investigation of brain regions which underlie developmental changes in cognitive, emotional and social-emotional functions over the course of child and adolescent development. For this purpose I will measure functional brain development longitudinally across the age range 8-20 years by using a combined cross-sectional longitudinal design including 240 participants. Participants will take part in two testing sessions over a four-year-period in order to track the within-subject time courses of functional brain development for cognitive, emotional and social-emotional functions and to understand how these functions develop relative to each other in the same individuals, using multilevel models for change. The cross-sectional longitudinal assessment of cognitive, emotional and social-emotional functional brain development in relation to brain structure and hormone levels is unique in the international field and has the potential to provide new explanations for old questions. The application of brain mapping combined with multilevel models for change is original, and allows for the examination of developmental trajectories rather than age comparisons. An integrative mapping (i.e., combined with task performance and with biological markers) of functional brain development is important not only for theory development, but also for understanding how children learn new tasks and participate in a complex social world, and eventually to tailor educational programs to the needs of children.

1 500 000 €

Start date: 2011-02-01, End date: 2016-01-31

'Coastal Frontiers' will involve the Principal Investigator, Dr Sunil Amrith, and a post-doctoral research assistant, in a study of the Bay of Bengal’s coastal rim from the late-nineteenth century to the present. This project will illuminate the entangled political and ecological history of the coastal arc stretching from India’s southern tip to the edge of the Malay Peninsula. It will combine macro-level perspectives on environmental change, contingent histories of transformations in political sovereignty, and local histories of coastal peoples. It seeks to examine how people have actually inhabited the coastal borderlands of Asia, and the contrasting ways these worlds appear through the eyes of states, or in the minds of coastal ecologists. It will focus on key coastal sites at the frontiers of ecological change, at the frontiers between empires and nations, at the frontiers between terrestrial and maritime law. The project will examine the deeper history of environmental change and political conflict in a region that is now particularly vulnerable to climate change, and at the fault-lines of strategic conflict between India and China. The project will build on the Principal Investigator’s recent work at the frontiers of scholarship in Asian history, through his studies of the links between South and Southeast Asia’s histories of migration and oceanic connection. It is time, now, to root this re-conceptualization of Asia’s regional frontiers in a closer study of environmental change, but to do so in a way that does not lose sight of the experiences and consciousness of individuals. This represents a new departure in scholarship, combining environmental history with the history of transnational flows, bridging insights from the humanities and ecological science. This ambitious project seeks new ways for historians to engage with questions of planetary change, without losing the fine-grained detail and hard archival research that has characterised our discipline.

606 655 €

Start date: 2012-01-01, End date: 2015-06-30

Through animal domestication humans profoundly altered their relationship with nature, controlling the breeding of their major food sources for material, social or symbolic profit. Understanding this complex process is a compelling research aim. There is a need to develop new high-resolution genetic tools to put flesh on the bones of this two-millenium long transition. These will take advantage of very recent advances: targeted next generation DNA sequencing, high throughput screening of expertly provenanced archaeological samples, and emerging knowledge of modern cattle, sheep and goat genome science plus their genetic geographies. Combining these, this proposal will develop an ancient DNA data matrix that will be unparalleled in archaeological science. These data will unlock the key genetic changes that accompany the domestic state and the breeding structures that are a consequence of human management. It will also identify the wild and proto-domestic populations that later herds emerge from. A more precise geography and timing of the key changes will enable richer contextualising inform our assessement of why these changes take place. The 10,000 year matrix for each species will function as a standard spatiotemporal reference grid on which any subsequent bone or animal artefact may be placed i.e. via genetic postcoding. Exceptional discontinuities in the matrix will highlight points of strong historical interest such as the emergence of new trade networks, migrations and periods of economic turbulence - perhaps driven by climate fluctuations or plagues. The final work objectives will focus on diachronic sample assemblages selected to have particular import for both historical events and transitions in material culture. For example, manuscript vellum samples will give a uniquely dated series that will enable correlation of genetic change with historical studies of the timing and impact of past animal plagues (e.g. in C 14th and C 18th Europe).

2 499 693 €

Start date: 2012-07-01, End date: 2018-06-30