David Gow (Cognitive/Behavioral Neurology Group, Massachusetts General
Hospital), will present “Inference, phonology and the brain: What Granger analysis can tell us about the sources of phonological structure” Friday November 4, 2106, at 3:30 PM, in ILC N400. An abstract follows.

Abstract: Speech perception reflects the lawful phonological patterning
of language. This has been explained reasonably well through vastly
different approaches involving generative phonological rules and
constraints, statistical inference, and interactive associative mapping
processes. This three-way distinction can be distilled to different
accounts of the functional architecture of language processing.
Unfortunately, claims about functional architecture (e.g. modularity
versus interactivity) have proven notoriously hard to falsify using
traditional behavioral and BOLD imaging techniques. In this talk I will
introduce the use of Kalman-filter enabled Granger causation analysis of
MR-constrained MEG/EEG data as a powerful new tool to discover
functional architecture. By identifying the pattern of directed
influences between functionally interpretable brain regions during task
performance, this technique provides an entirely data-driven approach
for discovering functional architecture. Using this approach, I will
present data that challenges both statistical and rule/constraint
accounts of phonotactic influences on perception, and suggests that
phonotactic phenomena are the result of top-down lexical influences on
speech perception.