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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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Baby Research Center celebrates 10th anniversary

The Baby Research Center (BRC), owned jointly by the MPI for Psycholinguistics and the Radboud University Nijmegen, recently celebrated its 10th anniversary with an afternoon of games and activities for children and information for parents. The festivities took place on Sunday, July 11, at the MPI.

Baby Research Center celebrates 10th anniversary

July 29, 2010

The lab was initially set up by linguist, MPI director, and Spinoza prize winner Professor Dr. Anne Cutler with the aim of gaining a better understanding of language development in young children. Since then, research at the BRC has been expanded to cover communication before language and social-cognitive development.

Understanding babies

Every new parent in Nijmegen and Arnhem receives a letter inviting them to participate. More than 3000 babies have participated over the past 10 years. The BRC is quite unique in its field as there are few comparable labs worldwide where so many researchers from different fields work together towards a better understanding of how babies think and behave. Moreover, this lab uses electroencephalography (EEG) to measure brain activity, and also eye-tracking to discover, for example, whether a child understands what is being said or anticipates what will happen next.

Enjoyable experiments

Sabine Hunnius, director of the BRC, emphasises that the experiments are always designed in such a way that they are enjoyable for the children, while of course also answering specific research questions. Current research areas include cooperation, recognition of words in sentences, and cultural differences in the way that mothers interact with their children.

See also: www.babyresearchcenter.nl

For more information on the BRC, please contact Ulf Liszkowski, head of the Communication before Language group at the MPI. Phone: (+31) 24 352 14 79. Ulf.Liszkowski@mpi.nl

Last checked 2010-08-13 by Myrna Tinbergen

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