Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Neurobiology of Language Conference (NLC) 2009

I think the conference was a huge success. The meeting had over 300 registrants -- so many that an overflow room with an AV feed was required during the sessions. The meeting attracted a diverse group of scientists ranging those with linguistically oriented approaches to traditional neuropsychology, functional imaging, animal neurophysiology, and genetics. The speakers were a diverse group and included both senior scientists and post docs. I have to say this now appears to be THE conference for us neuroscience of language folks. Congratulations and thank yous to Steve Small and his group (particularly Pacale Tremblay) for organizing the meeting!

At a business meeting of interested scientists (a nice range of personalities: Tom Bever, Luciano Fadiga, Yosef Grodzinsky, Richard Wise, Alec Marantz, Gabriele Miceli, David Poeppel, Greg Hickok, Steve Small and more) it was decided that the conference should become an annual event, for now tied to the SfN meeting as a satellite, which means it will be in San Diego next year. There was discussion of possibly alternating N. America-Europe (and perhaps Asia & S. America) meeting sites in the future.

So mark you calendars for next year in San Diego. Any ideas for debate topics?

4 comments:

Unknown said...

I am a trauma specialist and licensed marriage and family therapist. I am seeking research on the effects of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder on language, speech, or Broca's area of the brain. Please email me with any authoritative research on the topic. I firmly believe that PTSD prevents language interact under stress.

Greg Hickok said...

I'm not aware of anything, but maybe a reader will have some leads for you. Have you tried pubmed?

Laura Menenti said...

Just wanted to say that i totally agree - it was a great meeting, and I'm happy that such a conference now exists. The calendar is marked, and we Europeans (which we only call ourselves in the US) would certainly be grateful if the conference came our way sometime in the future.

(Oh and Greg, the speakers were even more diverse: they also included at least one PhD student...)

Whitney Anne Postman said...

Here's an idea for a debate topic: Has the new wave of overt speech production studies with fMRI revealed anything we didn't already know about the neural substrate for language production, in healthy folks or people with language impairment?