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Program & Lecture Abstracts

Language, Music, and Cognition - Organizing Events in Time -

The aim of the spring school “Language, Music, and Cognition” is to offer students and researchers basic knowledge of the interdisciplinary research centered around language and music cognition, as well as to provide a scientific exchange platform for students and researchers with different research background. Within this broad field of research, the program of the current spring school specifically focuses on five topics:

1) social cognition
2) developmental psychology
3) cognitive neuroscience of speech, language, and communication
4) comparative evolutionary biology
5) computational and biological approaches.

The spring school is a five-day intensive course that includes lectures, group work sessions, a poster presentation, and social events. Each day will be dedicated to one of the research topics mentioned above. One group work and two lectures are scheduled everyday and will focus on this “topic of the day”. During the group work, participants will review the basics of the daily topic in and prepare for advanced topics in the following two lectures. Through this interactive group work, participants are able to exchange and extend their knowledge in an interdisciplinary setting. In addition, a poster presentation session will give participants an opportunity to present their own work and exchange ideas.

In addition to the scientific program, an excursion to the Cologne city and a social dinner will take place at the end of DAY 4 and DAY 5. These social events will facilitate networking and free discussions among students and researchers who share similar interests, but work in different fields.

Research areas and Lecturers

DAY1  Comparative Evolutionary Biology

Prof. Dr. Chris Petkov (Newcastle University, UK)
Structured Sequence Learning, Language Evolution and the Primate Brain

Prof. Dr. Constance Scharff (Free University of Berlin, Germany)
Language, Music and Birdsong: Behavioral, Neural and Genetic Similarities, and Differences

DAY2  Social Cognition

Prof. Dr. Ian Cross (University of Cambridge, UK)
Music, speech and the relational dimension of social interaction

Mathis Jording & David Vogel (University of Cologne, Germany) instead of Prof. Dr. Dr. Kai Vogeley
Neural Mechanisms of Intersubjectivity

DAY3  Developmental Psychology

Prof. Dr. Teresa Guasti (University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy)
Prediction of abstract representations from the rhythmic and the syntactic structures

Prof. Dr. Barbara Höhle (University of Potsdam, Germany)
Prosodic cues in early first language acquisition

DAY4  Cognitive Neuroscience of Speech, Language, and Communication

Dr. Daniela Sammler (Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Germany)
The Melodic Mind: Neural bases of intonation in speech and music

Prof. Dr. Sonja Kotz (Maastricht University, the Netherlands)
Multimodal emotional speech perception: Why time and attention matters

DAY5 Computational and biological approaches to language and music

Prof. Dr. Cedric Boeckx (University of Barcelona, Spain)
Language, music, and the brain: Wrestling with granularity mismatch issues

Prof. Dr. Uwe Seifert (University of Cologne, Germany)
On Being Moved: From Musical Semantics to Music-Readiness in Computational Comparative Neuroprimatology

Lecturer page