As you all know, CRL is a big, multi-disciplinary, international community. This section of the newsletter aims to be a source for readers to turn to in order to find out what is going on in CRL at large. Examples of things you can find out in this corner are announcements for recent and upcoming talks, meetings and conferences, information about new faculty members, visitors, graduate students and staff affiliated with CRL, new publications, developments and accomplishments from the labs/departments involved...

We need input from you ! We would appreciate it if you could send us news that you think CRL Newsletter readers would be interested in so that we can announce them here. Please send contributions to the editors.

Professors Maria Polinsky and Marta Kutas have been appointed as Co-Directors of the Center for Research in Language effective November 1, 2004.

Dr. Polinsky, is professor and past chair in the department of Linguistics whose research interests include language universals and their explanation, comparative syntactic theory, and the expression of information structure in natural language.  Her laboratory is currently pursuing issues of "Variation in Control Structures".

Dr. Kutas, a professor in the department of Cognitive Science, is an expert on human cognition and neuropsychology, electrophysiological and experimental methods of assessing human information processing, and language comprehension and production. These days her laboratory is pursuing issues of pre-activation (prediction) in language, hemispheric differences, role of mood in cognitive processing, role of aging in memory and language, and analytic advances in understanding event-related brain potentials (ERPs).

CRL will be holding a series of workshops and seminars in the upcoming year.  The first workshop was on automated speech recognition, and was given by UCSD Linguistics alumnus Bill Byrne, Director of Voice Solutions at the SAP Labs. The second workshop was on Broca's Aphasia, and was given by Nina Dronkers, a research scientist at CRL and Director of the Center for Aphasia and Related Disorders, VA Northern California Health Care System Departments of Neurology and Linguistics, University of California Davis.

Several workshops are planned for the upcoming year:

• Wernicke's Aphasia, Wernicke's Area and a Wernicke’s Aphasia case study, presented by Nina Dronkers, Director, Center for Aphasia and Related Disorders, VA Northern California Health Care System and Research Scientist, Center for Research in Language, University of California San Diego
• American Sign Language: Age of Acquisition, presented by Carol Padden, Professor of Communication, UCSD and Rachel Mayberry, Professor of Linguistics, UCSD
• Continuing Education Workshop for the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf: Processes and Methods for advanced cross-disciplinary academic translation, presented by Carol Padden, Professor of Communication, UCSD
• Genetics and Language, presented by Jeffrey Elman, Professor of Cognitive Science, UCSD, Ralph Greenspan, Neurosciences Institute, San Diego, and Rob Kluender, Professor of Linguistics, UCSD

For more information, contact  Margaret Paulson at 858-534-0714 or mpaulson@ucsd.edu

There will be a new 3-quarter course offered in the Fall that will be of interest to many people in CRL: Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Cognitive Neuroscience — an interdisciplinary program of courses sponsored by the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind. This will be offered as Cog Sci 260a, 260b, and 260c. The course organizer is Rick Buxton. Courses will be taught by David Dubowitz (Radiology) in the Fall (course title: fMRI Foundations); Frank Haist (Psychiatry) in the Winter (course title: fMRI Design and Analysis); and Rick Buxton (Radiology) in the Spring (course title: fMRI Advanced Topics).

Baldo, J.V., Dronkers, N.F., Wilkins, D.P., Ludy, C., Raskin, P., & Kim, J. (2005) Is problem solving dependent on language? Brain and Language, 92, 240-250.

Bates, E., Saygin, A.P., Moineau, S., Marangolo, P. & Pizzamiglio, L. (2005). Analyzing aphasia data in a multidimensional symptom space. Brain and Language, 92, 106-116.

Coulson, S., Federmeier, K.D., Van Petten, C., Kutas, M. (2005). Right Hemisphere Sensitivity to Word- and Sentence-Level Context: Evidence From Event-Related Brain Potentials. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 31(1),129-147.

Coulson, S., Williams, R.F. (2005). Hemispheric asymmetries and joke comprehension. Neuropsychologia, 43(1),128-141.

Delong K.A., Urbach T.P., Kutas M. (2005). Probabilistic word pre-activation during language comprehension inferred from electrical brain activity. Nature Neuroscience, 8(8), 1117-21.

Dick, F., Dronkers, N., Pizzamiglio, L., Saygin, A.P., Small, S.L., & Wilson, S. (2005). Language and the Brain. In M. Tomasello & D.I. Slobin, (Eds.) Beyond Nature-Nurture: Essays in honor of Elizabeth Bates. New Jersey: Erlbaum, pgs. 237-260.

Emmorey, K., Grabowski, TJ., McCullough, S., Ponto, L., Hichwa, R., & Damasio, H. (2005). The neural correlates of spatial language in English and American Sign Language: A PET study with hearing bilinguals. NeuroImage, 24, 832-840.

McCullough, S., Emmorey, K., & Sereno, M. I. (2005). Neural organization for recognition of grammatical and emotional facial expressions in deaf ASL signers and hearing nonsigners. Cognitive Brain Research, 22, 193-203.

Moreno , E.M., Kutas M. (2005). Processing semantic anomalies in two languages: an electrophysiological exploration in both languages of Spanish-English bilinguals. Brain Res Cogn Brain Res., 22(2), 205-20.

Roland, Douglas, Elman, Jeffrey L. and Ferreira, Victor S. (2005) . Why is that? Structural prediction and ambiguity resolution in a very large corpus of English sentences, Cognition, in press.

Sandler, W., Meir, I., Padden, C. and Aronoff, M. (2005). "The emergence of grammar: Sytematic structure in a new language" Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 102(4), ??.

Urbach, T.P., Woindmann S.S., Payne D.G., & Kutas, M. (2005). Mismaking memories. Psychol. Science,16(1),19-24.

Ackerman, F. & Boyd, J. 'Hungarian morphology and Williams Syndrome: A Word-based morphological and neuroconstructivist perspective.' Creativity, Mind, and Brain in Hungarian Scholarship: Past and Present. Indiana University, April 2-3, 2005.

Borovsky, A., Saygin, A.P., Dronkers, N.F., & Bates, E. (2005). Lesion mapping of word class deficits in conversational speech production in aphasic stroke patients. Poster at the 12th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, April 10 - 12, 2005, New York , NY .

Freedman, S. (2005). Effects of Attentional Focus on Oral-Motor Control and Learning. Poster at the 35th Clinical Aphasiology Conference, June 2nd, 2005, Sanibel Island, FL.

Kwon, N., Polinsky, M. and Kluender, R. Trace or pro? (2005). Effects of language parametric variation on processing. Poster at CUNY, April 2005, U of Arizona

Kwon, N., Polinsky M., and Kluender, R. (2005). Control structures in Korean. Poster at CUNY, April 2005, U of Arizona

Saygin, A.P., Dick, F., Moineau, S., Bates, E., Dronkers, N.F. & Sereno, M.I. (2005). Functional MRI reveals brain regions subserving recovery of speech comprehension in an aphasic patient with a lesion including Wernicke's area and severe residual environmental sound comprehension deficits. Poster at the 12th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, April 10 - 12, 2005, New York , NY .

Elizabeth Bates Graduate Research Fund

The Center for Research in Language provides awards to assist affiliated graduate students in their research. The first call for proposals will be in the 2006-07 year. The fund was created in memory of Elizabeth A. Bates, former director of the Center. Information will be available on the CRL website.

If you wish to contribute to this fund in memory of Elizabeth Bates, please send to: Elizabeth Bates Graduate Research Fund, c/o Center for Research in Language - MC 0526; University of California , San Diego ; La Jolla , California 92093-0526 (checks payable to Regents of UC). In keeping with Professor Bates' deep commitment to supporting students, this fund is used to assist graduate students in their research, emphasizing the many areas in which Professor Bates made pioneering contributions.

The Center for Research in Language has a training program, "Language, Communication, and the Brain." The NIDCD-funded grant supports 2 post-doctoral trainees and 6 pre-doctoral trainees. Applications for postdoctoral positions are solicited every March 1. (See our website for details.) Predoctoral trainees are selected by the executive committee of the training grant. Graduate students who are interested in participating in this program, or your faculty advisor, should contact a member of the committee to indicate your interest. The executive committee members are: Marta Kutas, Cognitive Science (Director of Program); Jeffrey Elman, Cognitive Science; Maria Polinsky, Linguistics; Martin Sereno, Cognitive Science; David Swinney, Psychology; and Beverly Wulfeck, Language & Communicative Disorders.

In addition, the Institute for Neural Computation offers pre-doctoral and post-doctoral fellowships. The application deadline is April 1. For details, please refer to the INC website at http://inc.ucsd.edu .

Below are some links to some research institues around the world that are part of the CRL community:

• New Bulgarian University, Bulgaria

• Jozsef Attila University, Hungary

• National Ming Yang University, Taiwan