What did Professor Manuel Carreiras informed us in the center？
During May 5-9, 2019, Professor Manuel Carreiras, Director of the Basque Center for Cognition, Brain and Language, Spain, gave a lecture on the frontiers of language cognition at the invitation of the Center for Cognition Science of language, BLCU.
The first lecture was titled "The LiterateBrain". Professor Carreiras mainly introduced the cognitive mechanism of word-form transformation, as well as the time course and neural pathway of reading processing. He also deeply explored the neural basis of dyslexia and its neural loop failure.
The second lecture was named "Mechanism of agreement," the principle of consistency plays an important role in language understanding, especially in languages with rich morphological changes. Professor Carreiras, with monolingual and late Spanish learners as subjects, used behavioral and neuroimaging evidence to reveal the process of consistency in language comprehension, detailing the following questions: 1) How to solve the consistency problem online when the semantic or morphological and syntactic features are missing, 2) The applicability problem of consistency processing; 3) Whether the second language learner processes the consistency problem as the way in which he learns his first language; 4) The enlightenment of consistency on the sentence processing mechanism.
The third lecture was titled "The bilingualbrain: Plasticity and processing from cradle to grave", Professor Carreiras first challenged the previous "bilingual advantage" perspective. Secondly, Professor Carreiras studied adult and infant (monolingual, bilingual and second language learners) and reported behavioral and neuroimaging evidence of language processing cognition and brain mechanisms. Finally, Professor Carreiras elaborated on the characterization and activation patterns of the two languages in the bilingual brain. Whether the brain mechanisms used by the skilled second language learners in the language processing are the same as those of the first language. He also illustrated the difference of neural activity processed by different modal languages.
The three lectures were informative and full of novel perspectives. The comprehensive application of various experimental techniques such as EEG, fMRI and fNIRS demonstrated the cutting-edge research level of Professor Carreiras and his team. The atmosphere of the lecture was lively and we had full discussions, and the teachers and students present benefited a lot.
Introduction to the presenter
Manuel Carreiras
He is currently Director of the Basque Center for Cognition, Brain and Language in Spain, Professor of the Basque IKERBASQUE Science Foundation, Visiting Professor at the University of Basque, Honorary Professor at University College London, and Editor-in-Chief of the internationally renowned journal Frontiers in LanguageScience, Associate Editor of Brain and Language, Associate Editor of Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience. His research interests are mainly in reading, bilingual and second language acquisition from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience. Professor Carreiras has published more than 200 high-impact journal articles, including 2 articles published as the first author in the international top journal Nature.
In 2012, Professor Carreiras received research funding of 2.5 million euros from the European Research Council and won the Euskadi Research Award in 2015.
