In the first Cognitive Webinar of this year, we are excited to host Sophie Slaats, a postdoctoral researcher at the Université de Genève.
In her talk, titled “From Sentences to Words, and Back Again: Statistical and Structural Relations in the Neural Signal,” we will explore recent advances in neurolinguistics and psycholinguistics, focusing on how the brain processes linguistic structure and statistical regularities.
To join the event, please fill out the registration form below. Further details about the date, time, content, and speaker bio can also be found below.
Date: 19th November, Wednesday
Time: 8 PM (GMT +3), 6 PM (CET), 12:00 PM (EST)
Below you can also find more information about the content and the speaker herself:
From sentences to words, and back again: Statistical and structural relations in the neural signal
To understand spoken language, we need to recognize words and combine them into sentences. Much about the neural mechanisms underlying these processes is to date unknown. In this talk, I will present results from two studies with magnetoencephalography (MEG) that suggest that these processes are highly interactive. In the studies, participants listened to spoken single sentences and word lists, or continuous stories in Dutch, their native language. We studied processing of words and sentence structure in slow neural activity (the delta band; 0.5-4 Hz) using Temporal Response Functions. The first study showed that low-frequency neural signals respond differently to words that are embedded in sentences than to words that are in unstructured word lists. The second study revealed that the probability of words affects how our brain responds to sentence structure. Taken together, these studies suggest that the availability of linguistic information at one level – sentence structure or word probability – affects the timing of neural responses at the other level. This highlights that structure and probability actively work together to support language comprehension.
Sophie Slaats (PhD)
Sophie Slaats is a postdoctoral researcher at the Université de Genève, working in Dr. Alexis Hervais-Adelman’s group DynoBaLL. Her research focuses on the neural mechanisms underlying language comprehension, particularly the roles of hierarchical structure and lexical probability in linguistic processing. She investigates these questions using MEG, EEG, and iEEG methods combined with time-resolved regression analyses. Sophie completed her PhD in Psycholinguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Radboud University, following degrees in Cognitive Neuroscience and Linguistics from Utrecht University and BCBL in Spain.
The Cognitive Webinar is conducted online, exclusively in English, and is designed to engage an international audience. Through this series, CogIST aims to establish a platform that extends beyond science communication, enhancing interaction and collaboration among academics worldwide. Featuring talks from numerous researchers and scientists, the series will cover a diverse range of topics within cognitive science, facilitating the exchange of ideas and interdisciplinary discourse.
