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Welcome to the Max Planck Institute for PsycholinguisticsFeb 03, 2012
Speech perception involves both hemispheres of the human brain, but not in the same way. Speech sounds vary a lot among speakers, depending on a speaker's build, age, and gender, but listeners quite easily understand them. How does the brain achieve this? The right hemisphere is more strongly influenced by speech context (which can contain clues to speaker-specific characteristics), while the left hemisphere trusts more what the ears actually hear, MPI researchers Matthias Sjerps, Holger Mitterer and James McQueen recently discovered. Their paper 'Hemispheric differences in the effects of context on vowel perception' was published last week in the journal Brain and Language.
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Jan 24, 2012
The popular science TV programme Labyrint will feature MPI's research project "The Language of Perception", in an episode that explores the nature of language and the importance of linguistic diversity. Asifa Majid and Mark Dingemanse, researchers at MPI's Language and cognition department, talk about their research on language and perception and their fieldwork in Malaysia and Ghana respectively. The episode will be aired on Wednesday, January 25, 20:55 on Nederland 2.
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Dec 22, 2011
Chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas and bonobos make more sophisticated decisions than was previously thought. Great apes weigh their chances of success, based on what they know and the likelihood to succeed when guessing, according to a study of MPI researcher Daniel Haun, published on December 21 in the online journal PLoS ONE. The findings may provide insight into human decision-making as well.
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Dec 20, 2011
MPI researchers Asifa Majid and Mirjam Ernestus both received Vici Grants of 1.5 million euro for innovative research from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Majid will investigate human olfaction at the intersection of language, culture and biology, while Ernestus will study how people learn pronunciation variants for words in a foreign language.
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Dec 06, 2011
The Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea have a special relation with the spirits of the dead that 'live' in their underworld paradise, Tuma. Gunter Senft, researcher at MPI's Language and Cognition Department, published a new book about the Tuma underworld of love, the Trobriand Islanders' erotic and other narrative songs, and their spirits of the dead.
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Dec 02, 2011
Researchers from the MPI for Psycholinguistics and colleagues in France, Spain, the US, Belgium, the UK and Singapore have developed an app that enables scientists to collect large volumes of data on language processing in the brain. In just four months, they have collected the volume of data it would normally take them three years to obtain. The study was recently published in PloS ONE.
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Nov 25, 2011
How do listeners manage to deal with variation in speech? They rely on cues in the speech context, Matthias Sjerps, researcher at MPI's Individual differences in language processing department, concludes. On November 28 at 15:30, in the Radboud University aula he will defend his thesis 'Adjusting to different speakers: Extrinsic normalization in vowel perception'.
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Nov 17, 2011
Researchers and staff at MPI were deeply saddened to learn of the death of Melissa Bowerman, senior scientist emerita of MPI's Language Acquisition Department. Melissa passed away unexpectedly on October 31, after a brief illness.
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