Megha Sundara will be invited professor at ENS from June 20 to July 14. She will give the following three talks.

The replication crisis affects dyslexia research as much as any other field. This is facilitated by questionable research practices such as p-hacking, HARKING, as well as publication bias. The goal of this project is to quantify the extent of this problem, by meta-analysing one section of dyslexia research, using a method called p-curve or z-curve analysis.

In order to test precise hypotheses about learning mechanisms and the causes of cognitive disorders, it is increasingly useful to have computational models of the cognitive functions concerned.

According to Robert Trivers and Dan Willard's hypothesis, parents in good condition should favour male offspring, while parents in poor condition should favour female offspring. Why? First, parents with more resources can support more offspring. Second, males with more resources are more likely to have many offspring. Natural selection should therefore favour investment in male offspring when parents are in good condition, since their sons will have a chance to have many children in turn.

Les bébés sont de véritables petits détectives du langage qui utilisent les indices cachés de la phrase pour deviner le sens des mots.

Researchers from the Laboratoire de sciences cognitives et psycholinguistique (UMR8554, CNRS / EHESS / ENS-PSL) and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology studied the vocal experiences of children from the island of Malakula (Vanuatu) where multilingualism is the norm. The results, recently published in the journal Developmental Science, reveal that the children on the island vocalize at a rate comparable to that of children from monolingual populations usually studied, despite the fact that they hear less speech.

"This is the largest study of HIQ in the world," says Franck Ramus.

We often discuss about barriers to diversity as a function of gender and race, but we hear a lot less about another massive effect: low geographic diversity. 

This event aims to promote a discussion about geographic diversity in science, particularly among expat sc

La dyslexie est un trouble spécifique de l’acquisition de la lecture et de l’orthographe, qui affecte environ 5% des enfants. Les études de familles et de jumeaux ont suggéré depuis longtemps une composante génétique à la dyslexie. Ces 20 dernières années, plusieurs études ont avancé que certains gènes étaient associés à la dyslexie mais les résultats génétiques étaient jusqu’à présent peu informatifs, car les effectifs étaient encore insuffisants pour mener des analyses à l’échelle du génome entier.

Anomia (word finding difficulties) is the hallmark of chronic aphasia.  Speech production is dependent both on regional changes within the left inferior frontal cortex (LIFC) and modulation between and within anatomically distinct but functionally connected brain regions. Interregional changes are particularly important in speech recovery after stroke, when neural plasticity changes underpinning behavioural improvements are observed in both ipsilesional and contralesional frontal cortices.