Group leaders sought at SISSA

The Cognitive Neuroscience Sector at SISSA, in Trieste, Italy, seeks to recruit 2 independent group leaders, one to carry out research in Brain and Language and the other in Cognitive Neuroscience of Social Behaviour. The positions are for 3 years, renewable for 3 more.

The call for applications, in Italian for bureaucratic reasons, is available athttp://www.sissa.it/main/?p=A3_B4&id=933, with deadline February 28. Candidates are sought worldwide, and all academic activities at SISSA are conducted in English.

SISSA is one of the three purely postgraduate and postdoctoral institutions within the Italian university system, consistently ranked at the top by measures ranging from publications to external funding to visibility outside of Italy. It is keen to enhance its international character and its intellectual diversity. The Sector currently has 25 PhD students supported on SISSA fellowships, over half of whom are not Italians. Postdocs, however, are normally supported by individual research funding. Faculty members are required to teach limited PhD mini-courses, and to individually supervise the research of students in their groups. Further information about the Sector can be found on the http://www.sissa.it/cns/ and informal inquiries are welcome, e.g. by e-mail to alessandrotreves@gmail.com, with a CV attached, or by phone +39-040-3787623

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SISSA - Cognitive Neuroscience - via Bonomea 265, 34136 Trieste, Italy
rm:241 tel:39040-3787623 fax:39040-3787528
http://people.sissa.it/~ale

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Conference: Protolang

Conference: Protolang
Torun, Poland
September 19-21, 2011

Protolang is a biennial conference organised by the Department of English, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Torun. One of the primary goals of this conference is bringing together researchers representing a variety of areas in order to gain a multidisciplinary perspective on the range of currently available evidence relevant to early language evolution. The focus of the conference is on the early stages of the emergence of symbolic, language-like communication in hominids. The conference will reflect the inherently interdisciplinary nature of research into the evolution of language. We invite papers from a wide range of subjects related to language evolution.

Keynote Speakers:

John Gowlett (University of Liverpool; Lucy to Language British Academy Project) - "Language Beginnings – a view from the early archaeological record"

Juliane Kaminski (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology) - "Do dogs get the point"

Adam Kendon (Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, University of Pennsylvania)- "An evolutionary approach to explaining why patterned visible bodily action commonly occurs when people speak"

Katie Slocombe (Department of Psychology, University of York)
"Vocal communication in chimpanzees"

Call for papers (due May 30) here: http://protolang.umk.pl

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CFP: Advances in Biolinguistics (SLE 44, preliminary)

CALL FOR PAPERS: Advances in Biolinguistics
WORKSHOP DATES: 10–11 September 2011
CONFERENCE: SLE 44 (http://sle2011.cilap.es)
LOCATION: Logroño (La Rioja), Spain
CFP DEADLINE: 14 November 2010

Contact Person: Kleanthes Grohmann (kleanthi@ucy.ac.cy)

Biolinguistics is concerned with exploring the basic properties of the language faculty, how it matures in the individual, how it is put to use in thought and action (including communication), what brain circuits may implement it, and how it emerged in the human species. In asking these questions, biolinguists try to determine which components of the brain are unique to language, as opposed to shared with other cognitive domains such as music and mathematics, and especially those that also seem unique to humans. If, as seems reasonable to suppose, our linguistic capacity is both uniquely human and, in part, uniquely comprised of language-specific mechanisms, significant conceptual and empirical issues arise concerning its evolution, form, maturation, and function.

We encourage submissions of abstracts that touch on any of the issues listed above, or any other that contributes to our understanding of the biological foundations of the language faculty. Of special interest are contributions that bring biological considerations to bear on linguistic theorizing.

Advances in Biolinguistics is a workshop intended for the 44th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (http://sle2011.cilap.es). Since we will need to submit a proposal with a preliminary list of speakers by November 15, we need preliminary titles and mini-abstracts (3-5 sentences) from potentially interested participants. The deadline for these is Sunday, November 14, 2010. Please note that expressing an interest in participation by sending us a title and mini-abstract is not binding. The final deadline for regular abstracts, to be submitted via the conference site, is January 15, 2011. We will send interested participants a reminder about this, and we will of course also let them know, by mid-December, whether the workshop was accepted.

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