Cedric Boeckx will give a talk on June 19 at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig:
"The thalamus and the neurobiological infrastructure of the language-ready brain"
Abstract: Building on considerations and proposals developed in Boeckx 2013 and Boeckx and Benitez-Burraco 2014, this talk will focus on offering concrete proposals concerning the neurological substrates of some aspects of the human language faculty. I will begin by reviewing evidence for a mosaic-like organization of the language faculty, and then turn to the roles that the thalamus might play in making our brain language-ready. The talk will in part be a plea to take subcortical structures into account in an attempt to offer an adequate neurobiological account of components of language, specifically those that make human cognition distinct.
References
Boeckx, C. 2013. Biolinguistics: Forays into Human Cognitive Biology. Journal of Anthropological Sciences 91:6389.
Boeckx, C, and Benitez-Burraco, A. 2014. The shape of the language- ready brain. Frontiers in Psychology 5:282.
This event will take place at MPI's Department of Neuropsychology (Wilhelm Wundt Room), at 11pm.
More information
here.