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Max Planck Institute
About MPI

 

The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics is an institute of the German Max Planck Society. Our mission is to undertake basic research into the psychological,social and biological foundations of language. The goal is to understand how our minds and brains process language, how language interacts with other aspects of mind, and how we can learn languages of quite different types.

The institute is situated on the campus of the Radboud University. We participate in the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, and have particularly close ties to that institute's Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging. We also participate in the Centre for Language Studies. A joint graduate school, the IMPRS in Language Sciences, links the Donders Institute, the CLS and the MPI.

 

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Language evolution in our hand

How did our language capacity evolve? What did the first humans communicate to each other? And how does a new language emerge? These challenging questions, which recently have become very popular, are still facing language scientists today. On April 19th, the Nijmegen Gesture Centre of the Radboud University Nijmegen will organise a Spring Workshop at the MPI for Psycholinguistics which will focus on the role of gesture and sign in language evolution and look at the human language capacity from a new perspective.

Language evolution in our hand

Nicaraguan children using sign language.

April 8, 2010

The one day workshop of the Nijmegen Gesture Centre (NGC) will take place close to Evolang8, the 8th International Conference on the Evolution of Language at the University of Utrecht from April 14 to 17. Among the speakers in Nijmegen are leading scientists working on the role of gesture in spoken language and its evolution, and also researchers who documented the beginning of Nicaraguan Sign Language as it emerged over three generations.

More than speech

'Most discussions on language evolution center around the question of how to account for the evolution of speech', says Asli Özyürek, who organises the spring workshop together with Connie de Vos. 'Our language capacity, however, is more than speech. It manifests itself multimodally - as accompanied both by gesture in spoken languages, and in sign languages of deaf communities. Discussions on language evolution need to take the fundamentally multimodal nature of language as a starting point, rather than speech. The aim of the NGC workshop is to bring this to the attention of language evolution researchers and language scientists in general.'

How to register

Those interested to participate in the NGC Spring workshop are kindly requested to register by sending an email to connie.devos@mpi.nl or to asliozu@mpi.nl.

Last checked 2010-07-29 by Myrna Tinbergen

Max Planck Institute
for Psycholinguistics


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