Marcel Bastiaansen

My research focuses on language comprehension. The central characteristic of language comprehension is that very rapidly very different sources of information, including information about form, syntax and meaning of words are accessed and combined. Brain imaging studies have shown that a large number of brain areas are involved in processing each of these relevant types of information. A fundamental issue in research on the neurocognition of language comprehension is therefore, how the dynamic binding of the distributed nodes of the language network takes place, such that an adequate mapping of form onto meaning results. In the past decade it has become increasingly clear that synchronous, oscillatory neuronal activity, which can be recorded by electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG), plays an important role in dynamically linking brain areas. Therefore, studying oscillatory EEG/MEG phenomena may provide a window onto the mechanisms that solve the binding problem for language comprehension. Investigating these neural dynamics by exploiting recent techniques in neuroimaging, such as time-frequency analysis of EEG and MEG, and EEG/fMRI integration forms the core of my research agenda.

Ongoing projects:
* frequency-based segregation of syntactic and semantic unification (my main research line)

* beta and gamma oscillations in semantically coherent and incoherent short discourses (with Christian Hoffman and Herbert Schriefers)

* word- and sentence level semantics during idiom comprehension (with Joost Rommers and Ton Dijkstra)

* semantic and syntactic unification aspects of particle verbs (with Vitoria Piai and Rob Schreuder)

* simultaneous EEG / fMRI to study connectivity in the brain's language network (with Rene Scheeringa, Zude Zhu, and others)

* syntactic and semantic unification in relation with information structure (with Lin Wang)

* Neural correlates of turn-taking (with Lilla Magyari and Stephen Levinson)