SMART Cognitive Science conference, Amsterdam, March 2015
PhD Student Ariadni Loutrari presented at the SMART Cognitive Science conference in Amsterdam in March 2015.
Ariadni Loutrari
I presented part of my doctoral work in the SMART Cognitive Science conference in Amsterdam in March 2015. The title of the paper was ‘Beyond pitch contours: a speech-music dissociation in a right temporo-parietal patient’ and was co-authored with Marjorie Lorch, Professor of Neurolinguistics in the Department of Applied Linguistics and Communication at Birkbeck, University of London. The conference consisted of many workshops, including a workshop on shared processing in language and music which is the research area I’m working in for my PhD. Invited speakers in the conference included internationally recognized leaders in the field-- Ray Jackendoff, Tecumseh Fitch, Peter Hagoort, Andreas Roepstorff, Usha Goswami, Stefan Koelsch, Simon Kirby, and many others. The conference brought together researchers from linguistics, neuroscience, musicology, biology, and psychology addressing questions in cognitive science but also raising issues such as whether the humanities and cognitive sciences can successfully produce research in collaboration. Researchers in the field of the comparative study of language and music presented evidence on the controversial topic of processing mechanisms across the domains of language and music. Others emphasised differences between them and others focused on processing similarities, using a variety of tools, from behavioural experiments to neurophysiological techniques.
My presentation provided data from my study with Professor Marjorie Lorch on a right temporo-parietal stroke patient who displayed a language-music processing dissociation. Going beyond previous investigations that focused on linguistic and emotional prosody, this study developed novel tasks that examined the relationship between the perception of musical ‘expressiveness’ in performance and the perception of analogous features in the speech domain. Features such as length and loudness were manipulated in stimuli across domains and the patient’s performance was considered with respect to the performance of 24 neurologically healthy individuals of matched age, education, handedness and music training. The patient’s performance was only at chance on some speech perception tasks, whereas his performance in the musically domain was as good or better than that of the healthy participants. The findings coming from this study expand research beyond previously investigated acoustic properties of pitch in the linguistic and the musical domain and explore dimensions beyond syntax and emotion.
My experience at the conference was particularly fulfilling as I was given the opportunity to engage with experts in discussions of the current and crucial research issues and even more significantly, received positive feedback about my own doctoral research. This support provided by the Department of Applied Linguistics and Communication and the School of Social Sciences, History, and Philosophy made this valuable opportunity a possibility.