ICREA Symposium, preliminary schedule

Here is a preliminary schedule for our October symposium. (Subject to changes, so check back for updates):

ICREA International Symposium on Biolinguistics 

Time:                  October 1, 2 & 3, 2012

Place:                  Universitat de Barcelona, Aula Magna

PRELIMINARY PROGRAM

Monday, October 1

9.30-10.00                  Opening Remarks

                                    Jaume Bertranpetit (ICREA Director)

                                    M. Antonia Martí   (Chair, Department of General Linguistics, UB)

                                    Cedric Boeckx (ICREA/UB, symposium convener)

10.00-11.00                  Adaptationist and exaptationist hypotheses in Biolinguistics:

                                     Beyond the roadblock

W. Tecumseh Fitch (U. Vienna)

11.00-11.30                  Coffee break

11.30-12.30                  Emotion as a source of complexity in animal vocalizations

Kazuo Okanoya (U. Tokyo)

12.30-13.30                  Molecular windows into language: The view from FOXP2

Sonja Vernes (Max Planck, Nijmegen)

13.30-16.00                   Lunch break

16.00-17.00                  Brain form and brain function:

                                      Paleoneurological perspectives on the evolution of language

Emiliano Bruner (CENIEH, Burgos)

17.00-18.00                  Neandertal paleogenomics, FOXP2 and the origin of language

Carles Lalueza-Fox (U. Pompeu Fabra)

18.00-18.30                  Coffee break

18.30-19.30                  The ontogeny and phylogeny of language

Charles Yang (U. Pennsylvania)

Tuesday, October 2

09.00-10.00                  Cerebral correlates of constituent structures

Christophe Pallier (CNRS/INSERM-CEA, Paris)

10.00-11.00                  Variations in the recursive signal

Douglas Saddy (U. Reading)

11.00-11.30                  Coffee break

11.30-12.30                  Neurophysiological mechanisms involved in language learning in adults

Antoni Rodriguez-Fornells (ICREA/U. Barcelona)

12.30-13.30                  Phrasal prosody and word frequency bootstrap word order:

                                     A cross-linguistic study in adults and prelexical infants

Judit Gervain (CNRS, U. Paris Descartes)

13.30-15.00                   Lunch break

15.00-16.00                  Poster presentations

16.00-17.00                  Can cultural evolution explain why language has structure?

Simon Kirby (U. Edinburgh)

17.00-18.00                  Explaining the origins of grammatical agreement

Luc Steels (ICREA/U. Pompeu Fabra)

18.00-18.30                  Coffee break

18.30-19.30                  The ecophysics of language change

Ricard Solé (ICREA/U. Pompeu Fabra; Santa Fe Institute)

Wednesday, October 3

09.00-10.00                  The hands that rocked the cradle of language

Koji Fujita (U. Kyoto)

10.00-11.00                  The emergence of form in a new sign language

Wendy Sandler (U. Haifa)

11.00-11.30                  Coffee break

11.30-12.30                  Mechanisms of language acquisition as revealed by artificial language learning            

                                      experiments

Luca Bonatti (ICREA/U. Pompeu Fabra)

12.30-13.30                  The dorsal pathway as the interface between attention and language during learning

Ruth de Diego Balaguer (ICREA/U. Barcelona)

13.30-15.30                  Lunch break

15.30-17.30                  Roundtable

Toni Gomila (U. Balearic Islands)

Albert Bastardas (U. Barcelona, ICREA Academia program)

Joana Rosselló (U. Barcelona)

Kleanthes K. Grohmann (U. Cyprus)

17.30                  Reception, Sala de Professors, Josep Carner Building, 5th floor, UB

ICREA symposium website

Thanks to the work of BiB member Oriol Borrega, our ICREA Symposium has a website. click here for updates, but also keep checking this blog:

http://stel.ub.edu/symposium/

MA thesis defenses tomorrow

Tomorrow (Thursday, Sept. 6), 3 BiB members will defend their MA theses (9am to 12; room 3.3 of the Josep Carner building):
-[9am-10am] Anna Martinez Alvarez: Language in the brain: Brain pathways supporting computational operations
-[10am-11am] Evelina Leivada: A non-parametric approach to Universal Grammar within the Biolinguistic Program
-[11am-12] Jeroni Tutusaus:The Language Byproduct Conjecture: An explicit formulation and its consequences

(Defenses are public, and participation from the audience during the Q&A is welcome)