This editorial provides a background and overview of the interdisciplinary workshop on “The Social and Neural Bases of Creative Movement,” bringing together dancers, choreographers, musicians, artists, kinesiologists and neuroscientists to share perspectives and develop a common language to define and explore the relationship between dance and the brain.

The present paper explores the dynamics of speech production and perception in the context of syllabification and categorization. The selective review includes empirical work and dynamical models that account for changes in the perception and production of syllable structure as transitions between attractors in a dynamical system and that highlight the role of instabilities as a mechanism for regulating flexibility and change. Different conceptual approaches to changes in perceptual categorization are reviewed, including a nonlinear dynamic model, a related Bayesian approach, and a hybrid approach. Of particular importance are recent models that incorporate cognitive factors (such as attention, expectation, and memory) and that change slowly or quickly relative to the changing acoustic input. These dynamical models allow phenomena such as self-organization, emergence, and other hallmarks of complex adaptive systems and may also suggest a mechanism linking speech production and perception, providing an alternative description to the internal models often invoked. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Tuller and Feldman reflect on Carol Fowler the scientist and Fowler the person in the context of her work on coordinative structures and timing, links between production and perception, and how to survive in academia.

This article is a metalogue tracing one of Carol Fowler's theoretical contributions to understanding speech perception and, more broadly, cognition. Metalogues, a term coined by Bateson (1972), are conversations in which the content is illustrated by the structure. Similarly in this piece, the structure of the exposition embodies the dynamic progression of ideas. In particular, the structure of the text mirrors the perturbations that Fowler's and others' arguments brought to the 1980s view of speech segments. We start with an early, generally accepted theoretical approach (not endorsed by the authors and admittedly oversimplified), of speech segments as abstract and timeless. The text then moves toward and through a phase transition in which ideas, prose, and font become increasingly noisy and unstable until a very different theoretical outlook, espoused by Carol Fowler and colleagues, is established.

Synergetics has established a well-known top-down approach to the modeling of perceptual phenomena in psychology and cognitive sciences. This phenomenological approach is deply rooted in the theory of pattern formation and offers a formal justification that in the proximity of transitions from one pattern to another a low-dimensional description via canonical models is permissible. We exploit this thinking in the context of auditory scene analysis, specifically auditory streaming, where the brain network integrates or segregates sounds that arise from two or more distinct sources. We interpret the process of integration and segregation as a pattern formation process and demonstrate through mathematical modeling, behavioral experiments and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that selected networks in the brain get differentially activated as a function of the percept. We propose a functional architeture composed of brain areas with tonotopic organization (auditory cortex) and non-tonotopic organization (various parietal areas including right superior parietal lobule and precuneus). The dynamics of this functional architecture extends beyond auditory streaming and suggests the existence of informational convergence zones in the brain that get selectively activated in a nonlinear all-or-none fashion. This dynamics is reminiscent of phase transitions as discussed in synergetics and generalizes concepts well established in multisensory integration.

Applying for National Science Foundation Funding in Cognitive Science: Cognition, Computation, Development, Education, and Neuroscience Anne Cleary 1 (acleary@nsf.gov), James Donlon 2 (jdonlon@nsf.gov), Evan Heit 3* (ekheit@nsf.gov), Chris Hoadley 2,3 (choadley@nsf.gov), Laura Namy 1 (lnamy@nsf.gov), Akaysha Tang 1 (atang@nsf.gov), Betty Tuller 1 (btuller@nsf.gov) Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, Directorate for Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences Division of Information and Intelligent Systems, Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering Division of Research on Learning, Directorate for Education & Human Resources National Science Foundation 4201 Wilson Boulevard Arlington, Virginia 22230 USA *Corresponding author Keywords: cognitive science; research funding; grants; workshop; National Science Foundation. those most relevant to cognitive science, as well career development programs and international opportunities. 3. Attendees will participate in simulated grant review panels, where they will read actual cognitive science grant proposals and evaluate them in terms of NSF review criteria. 4. Finally, there will be an Ask a Program Officer session, for questions. Objectives and Background This half-day workshop will provide information and hands- on experience related to applying for National Science Foundation (NSF) funding in cognitive science. Program officers will discuss the NSF review process and NSF merit criteria. Details regarding a range of cognitive science research programs will be covered, including cognition, computation, development, education, and neuroscience. In addition, as an interactive activity, attendees will participate in simulated review panels using actual cognitive science grant proposals. It is expected that attendees will increase their knowledge of opportunities at NSF in support of cognitive science, for example a psychology researcher may learn more about education research opportunities and a computational researcher may learn more about neuroscience research opportunities. In addition, attendees will increase their understanding of how grant proposals are reviewed and funding decisions are made at NSF. The target audience of this workshop is anyone who intends to seek funding for cognitive science research, including graduate students, postdocs, new faculty, and experienced researchers. This workshop is an outreach event for NSF, which seeks broad participation in research and strives to fund excellent research in cognitive science and related fields. Table 1. Individual Programs Cognition Perception, Action & Cognition (PAC) Computation Information & Intelligent Systems (IIS) Development Developmental and Learning Sciences (DLS) Education (see Common Guidelines for Education Research) EHR Core Research (ECR) Research on Education and Learning (REAL) Discovery Research K-12 (DRK-12) Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) Educational and Human Resources Directorate Neuroscience Cognitive Neuroscience Outline of the Workshop Table 2. Cross-directorate and NSF-wide initiatives CAREER (Faculty early career development) Computational Cognition Cyberlearning International Science and Engineering (ISE) (International funding and collaboration) Understanding the Brain Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) The workshop will have four parts. 1. General information about applying for NSF funding will be covered, such as eligibility, parts of a proposal, budget issues, and the merit criteria for review. Program-specific information will be provided, including areas of emphasis and program-specific considerations. See Table 1 for a list of individual programs and Table 2 for a list of cross-directorate or NSF-wide initiatives. The focus will be on the newest initiatives and

The history of research on speech perception and speech production is replete with examples of nonlinearities between articulation and acoustics, and between acoustics and perception. These nonlinearities are useful for communication. They allow 1) adequate production of speech sounds and words despite people having different vocal tracts with different resonance capabilities, and 2) adequate word recognition despite variation in the acoustic signal across speakers, emphasis, background noise, etc. Yet context and the listener’s expectancies often strongly influence what is perceived; perception is dynamic, influenced by multiple factors that change slowly or quickly as speech goes on. In this chapter we present a selected history of demonstrations of nonlinearities in speech and attempt to exploit the nonlinearities in order to uncover the dynamics of both perception and production of speech.

phonological units, in a way that leads variations in how a given word is produced to be factored out at an early stage of processing (e.g., Fitzpatrick and Wheeldon, 2000; Lahiri and Reetz, 2002; Stevens, 2002). It is often hypothesized that inter-individual variations are removed prior to building up this abstract representation by means of a speaker normalization procedure (see Johnson, 2005b, for a recent review). A clear demarcation is established in that framework between the surface phonetic form of a word and the underlying phonological representation associated with that word. The abstractionist approach contends that the phonological representation for each word is both unique and permanently stored in memory. Readers are referred to Cutler et al. (2007), Eulitz and Lahiri (2004), Lahiri and Reetz (2002), Pallier et al. (2001), and Stevens (2002), for recent important papers in the abstractionist framework. In the terminology employed by Pitt and Johnson (2003), abstractionist models such as Lahiri and Reetz’s (2002) FUL model offer a representationbased solution to the speech variability problem. According to the FUL (Featurally Underspecified Lexicon) model, phonological representations in the lexicon are underspecified for certain features such as [coronal], and it is assumed that this makes listeners insensitive to surface variations shown by words for these features. For example, assimilation of word-final coronals to the place of articulation of the following consonant is considered to remain consistent with the underspecified phonological representation of the carrier word and, because of this so-called no-mismatch relationship between the word’s surface and underlying forms, assimilation is expected to have no disruptive effect on the identification of the word. As opposed to representationbased models, processing-based models rely on the assumption that recognizing the assimilated variant of a word entails recovering the word’s unassimilated shape through a phonological inference process. In spite of the fact that they too are representation-oriented, exemplar models stand, in their most prototypical form at least, in sharp opposition to abstractionist models like FUL along many dimensions. A major difference with the abstractionist stance relates to the fact that each exemplar is viewed as corresponding to a language chunk that is stored in memory with all the details specific to the particular circumstances in which it has been produced or encountered. This includes sensory-motor, semantic and pragmatic characteristics, but also indexical information about the speaker’s identity and the situation of occurrence, to mention but a few properties. Exemplars are therefore deeply anchored into their context of occurrence in the largest possible Roles of fine phonetic detail and abstract phonological categories in speech

Speech perception depends largely on information in an acoustic stream that is inherently dynamic: it changes constantly and fades rapidly. Transitions occur on many levels, from those between sound segments to syntactic adjustments. The present paper describes a program of research that is based on the idea that speech sound categorization occurs via transitions between attractors in a dynamical system. The dynamical system is structured by the native phonological system, as it is instantiated in the individual listener. Phonological learning is conceptualized as the emergence of attractors in the existing dynamical system. Nonlinear dynamic models, constrained by empirical data, are used to inform further research.

Previous studies (e.g., Fowler, 1977, 1979; Morton, Marcus, & Frankish, 1976) have shown that listeners' judgments of isochrony in speech are not based on the intervals between onsets of acoustic energy of successive syllables. An alternative proposal is that the perception of isochrony involves computations based on aspects of the amplitude contour of each syllable (Marcus, 1976). The present experiment used the technique of "infinite peak clipping" to assess the importance of the syllable's amplitude contour, particularly the peak increment in spectral energy, to listeners' judgments of isochrony. Infinite peak clipping gives all syllables, regardless of phonetic makeup, the same amplitude contour; only the durations vary. The results indicate that listeners' judgments of isochrony are unaffected by infinite peak clipping and thus are not based on the amplitude contour of syllables. Sequences of digits presented at acoustically regular intervals are perceived to occur with unequal spacing. Moreover, when allowed to adjust the intervals between successive digits until they sound isOChronous, subjects introduce systematic departures from acoustic isochrony (Morton, Marcus, & Frankish, 1976). These departures are such that the tempo~al alignment of a word relative to its neighboring words varies with the duration of acoustic energy prior to the acoustic onset of its vowel. Thus, for example, the acoustic onset-to-onset time, or "syllable-onset-asynchrony," for a word pair such as "eight-six" tends to be shorter than for "six-eight." These findings indicate that listeners' judgments of rhythmicity in speech are not based on the intervals between the onsets of acoustic energy of successive syllables. Morton et a1. proposed that, instead, listene~s judge the timing of word sequences based on reference points, termed "P-centers," within each word. The "P-center" is described as the "psychological moment of occurrence" of a word. Other investigators have identified what is probably the same reference point and have called it a "stress beat" (Allen, 1972; Rapp, 1971). We will use this more descriptive term. Further investigation by Morton et a1. failed to reveal any obvious acoustic markers of stress beats. Specifically excluded as markers were the +Also at Cornell University Medical College, New York. ++Also at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. Acknowledgments. We would like to thank Dr. F. S. Cooper for bringing the method of infinite peak clipping to our attention, and T. G. Halwes for help with the stimulus preparation. This work was supported by NINCDS grants NS13617 and NS-13870 and BRS g~ant RR-05596 to the Haskins Laboratories. [HASKINS LABORATORIES: Status Report on Speech Research SR-65 (1981)J

The dynamical system view of speech perception assumes that speech categorization depends on both the acoustic properties of the incoming sound and the state of the perceptual system (indexed by the subject's responses to preceding sounds). Tuller and colleagues [1] systematically manipulated the order of presentation of stimuli from a "say"-"stay" continuum in a binary-choice word identification task. Listeners' responses were modeled using a nonlinear dynamical system whose point attractors were associated with perceptual categories. In the present study, we asked French speakers to categorize stimuli on a continuum from "cèpe" /sεp/ to "steppe" /stεp/. Our results provide support for two yet untested predictions from the model: the occurrence of a) critical slowing down and b) critical fluctuations. Critical slowing down relates to the increase in relaxation time that occurs as the system approaches points of instability. Critical fluctuations refer to the system's increased sensitivity to random fluctuations near the points of instability. [Work supported by the CNRS & French Ministry of Research, and by NSF.] [1] P. Case, B. Tuller, D. Mingzhou, and J.A.S. Kelso. Evaluation of a dynamical model of speech categorization. Perception and Psychophysics, 57:977-988 (1995).

This paper examines the influence of context on the processing of category names embedded in sentences. The investigation focuses on the nature of information available immediately after such a word is heard as well as on the dynamics of adaptation to context. An on-line method (Cross Modal Lexical Priming) was used to trace how this process unfolds in time. We found that the information available immediately after a category word is presented is not altered by the sentence context in which the word is immersed. Rather, the structure of availability of particular exemplars of the category resembles the typicality structure of a conceptual representation. The adaptation to context occurs later (between 300 and 450 ms after the category word) and takes the form of a rapid reorganization of the structure rather than a gradual activation of a contextually relevant exemplar. We claim that such data is best accounted for in a dynamical framework, where a coherent global structure emerges through locally guided self-organization.

Qu'est-ce qui détermine le succès ou l'échec lorsque des adultes essaient d'apprendre à percevoir des sons de parole qui ne figurent pas dans leur langue maternelle ? Dans ce travail, l'apprentissage phonologique est exploré dans un cadre théorique explicitement dynamique. Les catégories phonologiques sont conçues comme les attracteurs d'un système dynamique évoluant au fur et à mesure que l'apprentissage se déroule. Le système dynamique lui-même est structuré par le système phonologique maternel, tel que celui-ci s'est mis en place chez l'auditeur individuel. Cette approche devrait contribuer à intégrer la phonétique et la phonologie (descriptions continues et descriptions symboliques et discrètes) à l'intérieur d'un cadre théorique commun, qui devrait lui-même permettre de mieux comprendre comment les individus perçoivent des formes phonologiques nouvelles.

The goal of the present study is to better understand the mechanisms involved in the processing of liaison consonants by listeners in French. Previous work (Wauquier-Gravelines 1996) showed that liaison consonants are more difficult to detect than word-initial consonants in a phoneme-detection task. We examined to what extent such differences are attributable to the consonants' phonetic properties, and we also compared the perception of liaison consonants with that of fixed word-final and word-medial consonants, as well as word-initial ones. The results suggest that liaison consonants have a specific perceptual status. Implications for both autosegmental and exemplar-based theories of liaison are discussed.

The goal of the present study is to better understand the mechanisms involved in the processing of liaison consonants by listeners in French. Previous work (Wauquier-Gravelines 1996) showed that liaison consonants are more difficult to detect than word-initial consonants in a phoneme-detection task. We examined to what extent such differences are attributable to the consonants’ phonetic properties, and we also compared the perception of liaison consonants with that of fixed word-final and word-medial consonants, as well as word-initial ones. The results suggest that liaison consonants have a specific perceptual status. Implications for both autosegmental and exemplar-based theories of liaison are discussed.

Teenagers with nonverbal learning disabilities (NLD) have difficulty with fine-motor coordination, which may relate to the novelty of the task or the lack of “self-talk” to mediate action. In this study, we required two teenagers with NLD and two control group teenagers to touch the thumb of each hand firmly and accurately to the fingertips of the same hand, in an order specified by verbal or tactile instruction. Brain activity patterns (measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging) suggest that unlike control participants, the NLD participants used internalized speech to facilitate the novel task only when instructions were verbal. NLD participants also showed activity in a more widely distributed network of neural structures. These findings provide preliminary evidence for remediation strategies that encourage internal speech.