Job Postings and Announcements 

Postdoctoral Position--BCBL (Basque Center on Cognition Brain and Language) 

The Basque Center on Cognition Brain and Language (San Sebastián, Basque Country, Spain) is offering a postdoctoral position to work on a project financed by the European Research Council (Advanced grant; PI Prof. Manuel Carreiras) that will explore reading skills and neural correlates in bilingual children.

The aim of the research project is to identify the changes in neural activity that take place in the course of learning to read in a first (L1) and in a second (L2) language. The project will employ a longitudinal design. Children will be recruited before they learn to read in L1 and in L2, and reading development will be tracked with both cognitive and neuroimaging (MEG/EEG, fMRI, DTI) measures over 24 months. Cohorts will be recruited in several parts of Spain and France to test Basque/Spanish and Basque/French children as well as Spanish and French monolingual children.

The postdoctoral fellow will be in charge of coordinating part of the project, working directly with a PhD student and research assistants. We are looking for a cognitive neuroscientist or experimental psychologist with a background in psycholinguistics and/or neighboring cognitive neuroscience areas. Strong knowledge on reading acquisition and bilingualism and expertise in developmental investigation are required. Expertise in EEG, MEG and/or fMRI would be appreciated. Candidates should have a strong publication track record.

The Center promotes a rich research environment without teaching obligations. It provides access to the most advanced behavioral and neuroimaging techniques, including 3 Tesla MRI, a whole-head MEG system, four ERP labs, a NIRS lab, a baby lab including an eyetracker, two eyetracking labs, and several well-equipped behavioral labs.  There are excellent technical support staff and research personnel (PhD and postdoctoral students). The position has a term of appointment of 2 years with possible renewal.  

Individuals interested in undertaking research in this field should send CV and two recommendation letters to Leire Arietaleanizbeascoa (email: l.arieta@bcbl.eu).

Deadline December 31st 

In collaboration with Frontiers in Psychology, we are currently organizing a Research Topic, "Mind what you say - general and specific mechanisms for monitoring in speech production." We welcome contributions from SNL members. 

The proposed structure of this Research Topic is provided below:

Host Specialty: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 

Research Topic Title: Mind what you say - general and specific mechanisms for monitoring in speech production 

Topic Editor(s): Greig de Zubicaray, Daniel Acheson, Robert Hartsuiker 

Description: Psycholinguistic research has typically portrayed speech production as a relatively automatic process. This is because when errors are made, they occur as seldom as one in every thousand words we utter. However, it has long been recognised that we need some form of control over what we are currently saying and what we plan to say. This capacity to both monitor our inner speech and self-correct our speech output has often been assumed to be a property of the language comprehension system. More recently, it has been demonstrated that speech production benefits from interfacing with more general cognitive processes such as selective attention, short-term memory (STM) and online response monitoring to resolve potential conflict and successfully produce the output of a verbal plan. <br /> <br />The conditions and levels of representation according to which these more general planning, monitoring and control processes are engaged during speech production remain poorly understood. Moreover, there remains a paucity of information about their neural substrates, despite some of the first evidence of more general monitoring having come from electrophysiological studies of error related negativities (ERNs). While aphasic speech errors continue to be a rich source of information, there has been comparatively little research focus on instances of speech repair. The purpose of this Frontiers Research Topic is to provide a forum for researchers to contribute investigations employing behavioural, neuropsychological, electrophysiological, neuroimaging and virtual lesioning techniques. In addition, while the focus of the research topic is on novel findings, we welcome submission of computational simulations, review articles and methods papers.

Abstract Submission Deadline: Feb 02, 2013
Article Submission Deadline: Jun 01, 2013

Frontiers Research Topics are designed to be an organized, encyclopedic coverage of a particular research area, and a forum for discussion and debate. Contributions can be of different article types (Original Research, Methods, Hypothesis & Theory, and others). Our Research Topic has a dedicated homepage on the Frontiers website, where contributing articles are accumulated and discussions can be easily held. Once all articles are published, the topic will be compiled into an e-book, which can be sent to foundations that fund your research, to journalists and press agencies, and to any number of other organizations. As the ultimate reference source from leading scientists, Frontiers Research Topic articles become highly cited.

Frontiers is a Swiss-based, open access publisher. As such an article accepted for publication incurs a publishing fee, which varies depending on the article type. The publishing fee for accepted articles is below average compared to most other open access journals - and lower than subscription-based journals that apply page and color figure charges. Moreover, for Research Topic articles, the publishing fee is discounted quite steeply thanks to the support of the Frontiers Research Foundation. Details on Frontiers' fees can be found at http://www.frontiersin.org/about/PublishingFees. 

When published, your article will be freely available to visitors to the Frontiers site, and will be indexed in PubMed and other academic archives. As an author in Frontiers, you will retain the copyright to your own paper and all figures.

For more information about this topic and Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, please visit: 
http://www.frontiersin.org/Human_Neuroscience/researchtopics/Mind_what_you_say_-_general_an/1197

Should you choose to participate, please confirm by sending us a quick email via the link above and then your abstract no later than Feb 02, 2013.
Guest Associate Editors, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (www.frontiersin.org)  

Call For Papers--26th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing

The 26th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing will be held March 21-23, 2013 at the Columbia Convention Center, Columbia, SC (note that we have returned to the Thursday/Friday/Saturday schedule). The website for the conference is http://artsandsciences.sc.edu/cuny2013/.

Abstracts are solicited for papers and posters presenting theoretical, experimental, and/or computational research on any aspect of human sentence processing.  Abstracts will be reviewed anonymously, and will be considered both for the general conference sessions and for a special session titled "Theories of Sentence Processing and the Neuroscience of Language."

Accepted presentations will form a program made up of three days of spoken papers presented in plenary sessions plus three poster sessions, one on each of the three days of the conference. Time constraints entail that a small percentage of accepted presentations can be given as talks. Therefore, reviewers will be asked to identify submissions that seem most likely to generate broad interest, on grounds of originality of ideas or significance to the field.

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION DEADLINE: SUNDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2012

This deadline applies to all submissions, whether for paper or poster. Notifications concerning acceptance or rejection will be made in mid-to-late January 2013.

*** NEW ABSTRACT GUIDELINES ***

Guidelines for preparation of abstracts differ substantially from those given in previous years, so PLEASE READ THIS SECTION CAREFULLY.  Abstracts should be submitted as a one-sided, single-spaced page (8.5"x11"- not A4), 1-inch margins all around, and in Arial 11 point font. Format must be PDF. The content can be whatever combination of text, figures, tables, charts, and graphics enables you to communicate your ideas effectively, but all content must conform to these specifications and be clearly legible.

All abstracts will be screened by our committee before they are sent out for review. Reviewers will also be asked to inform us of any abstracts they feel violate the guidelines. Obviously, our intention is not to be harsh or draconian; what we want to do is allow authors to include visual content in addition to text without making our job or that of the reviewers impossibly difficult.

Abstracts will be submitted electronically. The submission system is presently under construction.

INFORMATION ON THE SPECIAL SESSION

The special session will address fundamental questions about the architecture of the language system, based on new evidence from brain imaging, brain stimulation, and cognitive neuropsychology. We believe it is appropriate to ask whether the modules and processing systems that have been assumed up to now need to be profoundly reconsidered in light of what we know about language and the brain. The core of the Special Session is six invited talks by speakers with relevant expertise and diverse backgrounds who have been asked to consider this basic issue. We also encourage submissions of talks and posters that address the theme of the special session.

Invited speakers are Evelina Fedorenko, Julius Fridriksson, Peter Hagoort, Gina Kuperberg, Liina Pylkkänen, and Mark Seidenberg.

CUNY 2013 Organizers: Amit Almor, Dirk den Ouden, Stanley Dubinsky, Fernanda Ferreira