[BIC-announce] Seminar announcement

[Vincent Gracco]

Friday, December 7th at 1:30 pm -3:30 pm
Room 1034, McIntyre Medical Building, 1200 av des Pins ouest

Motor Cortex and Language Comprehension
Dr. Steven Small is a professor of Neurology and Psychology at the  
University of Chicago.

An important source of information for language comprehension comes  
from the perception of action, including the movements of the mouth  
and hands. The neural interactions involved in processing this  
information involve the premotor cortex, the inferior parietal lobule,  
and the superior temporal gyrus. These regions and the neural  
connections among them comprise a human system for observation- 
execution matching that appears to have a phylogenetic basis in the  
"mirror neuron" system of the macaque. It appears that this system  
operates in part by covert simulation of perceived action. In this  
talk, we present data from several studies of audiovisual language  
comprehension that support this thesis.

First we discuss the role of action understanding in speech  
perception, and show how it aids phonological disambiguation across  
environmental and contextual variation, and that the motor cortex  
plays a fundamental role in the process. We also show evidence for the  
existence of abstract neural codes for speech percepts that are  
independent of their auditory or visual components. In the second part  
of the talk, we discuss the role of action understanding in higher  
order language comprehension, which occurs through observation of  
manual gesture. Here we will show that some hand movements have  
semiotic meaning on their own, and are encoded in the brain very much  
like language; that other hand movements have meaning by virtue of  
their interaction with accompanying speech; and that these two types  
of linguistically relevant hand movements differ from similar hand  
movements that do not have the same relationship to language. We  
conclude that the process of understanding language involves  
multimodal sensory processing, motor simulation, and processing of  
derived abstract representations, which collectively form a  
distributed circuit encoding comprehension.

Sponsored by the Centre for Research on Language, Mind and Brain


Vincent L. Gracco, Ph. D.
McGill University
Faculty of Medicine
School of Communication Sciences & Disorders
1266 Pine Avenue West
Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3G 1A8

Telephone:	(514) 398-7386
Fax:	(514) 398-8123
E-mail:	vincent.gracco at mcgill.ca


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