On Thursday (07.05) we will host Prof. Chotiga Pattamadilok  (Research Director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) affiliated with the Laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-Marseille University, France). Her lecture will be entitled: " Impacts of reading acquisition on spoken language and visual information processing: Looking beyond the connections between the auditory and visual systems". The lecture will take place at 3 p.m. in the CN lecture hall and it will be followed by a get together.

Abstract:

Prof. Chotiga Pattamadilok  is a Research Director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) affiliated with the Laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-Marseille University, France. Her interdisciplinary research is at the intersection of linguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive neuroscience.

Literacy acquisition is one of the most powerful cultural acquisitions that induces massive changes in cognitive functions, brain organization and brain structure, both within and outside the language system. Among these changes, a number of studies have focused on the emergence and reinforcement of connections between the auditory and the visual systems. These connections are considered the core mechanism of reading, as they enable readers to rapidly and precisely translate abstract symbols into speech sounds and vice versa. In this talk, I will present a series of behavioral and brain imaging studies examining how, through these connections, the cognitive processes engaged during speech processing become increasingly “contaminated” by orthographic knowledge, thus, making the two language codes difficult to dissociate. Similarly, I will discuss how neural responses within the visual ventral pathway become sensitive to speech sounds. These findings have led us to look beyond the surface connections between the two language codes and to examine the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying these cross-modal activities, which reflect profound modifications within the spoken language and the visual systems themselves.