2026 Events

Rhythms are found everywhere in biological systems, from motor movements for locomotion to communication signals such as speech and music. I will present evidence that infants are sensitive to musical rhythms from before birth and that temporal processing is a general principle of brain functioning. I will also present evidence that auditory-motor interactions for timing are present early in development and that the human auditory system uses the motor system to accomplish rhythmic timing. Finally, I will discuss the social implications of coordinated movements in human interactions from musical ensembles to pro-social behaviour in infants, and why music can improve wellbeing.

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a prevalent neurodevelopmental disorder affecting approximately 12% of all school-aged children and is characterized by hyperactivity, impulsivity, and inattention.  ADHD is highly heritable and recent large-scale studies have identified significant risk loci, yet its complex genetic architecture remains poorly characterized across non-European populations. This serves as a major problem as we move towards personalized medicine approaches. Previous studies have suggested that ancestral genetics cannot be generalized across polygenic risk prediction. In this presentation, I will talk about how we are approaching this critical issue and building diagnostic approaches that work for everyone. 

Sign languages provide a powerful window into the nature of human language because they express linguistic structure through the visual–manual modality rather than speech. In this talk, I review the past 50 years of psycholinguistic and neuroscience research showing that signed and spoken languages share fundamental properties in their structure, processing, and neural organization. Experimental studies demonstrate that signers exhibit many of the same patterns found in spoken language users, including phonological errors and systematic organization of the mental lexicon, while neuroimaging research shows that sign languages recruit the same left-hemisphere language networks traditionally associated with speech. More recent work has begun to explore how sensory modality differences shape language processing. I then present research from my lab examining early visual sensitivities to language in infants and children, highlighting the flexibility of the human language system.  I conclude with ethical and practical considerations for future research with the Deaf community.

The existence of speech errors (e.g., intending to say “coin toss” and saying “toin coss” instead) and tip-of-the-tongue states (where someone knows exactly what they want to say, but cannot find how to say the right word) reveals an important fact about language production: whenever we say a word out loud, our minds need to select and assemble the sounds that make up that word so that we can properly articulate it. This process is called “phonological encoding” and happens quickly and (usually) without our explicit awareness. So how can we learn about what this process is like? I propose that spoken word durations offer us valuable clues into how phonological encoding works. In this talk, I review a pair of foundational patterns from the language production literature: form repetition reduction - where words are produced with shorter durations if they have recently been said or heard - and sequential cueing - where words are produced with longer durations if a word that begins with the same sounds has been recently said or heard - and I propose a theory that explains both effects as emerging organically as artifacts of the phonological encoding process. Specifically, the theory claims that the phonological encoding system learns after every production, and it makes testable predictions about the factors that shape repetition reduction and sequential cueing. I present simulations from a computational implementation of this theory to show that it can correctly account for the classic repetition reduction and sequential cueing effects. Lastly, I present novel predictions made by this theory and present data from 2 behavioral studies supporting one of these predictions: that contrary to previous proposals, repetition reduction and sequential cueing effects arise purely from the sequencing of sounds, and do not rely on lexical (i.e., word) representations.

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