Jos van Berkum

The overall goal of my research is to understand the nature of sentence- and discourse-level language comprehension, with a specific focus on how people relate the unfolding utterance to its wider context in real time. Topics include establishing reference in context, the anticipation of upcoming meaning, the language-valence interface, mood-based modulation of language processing, the interaction of static and linguistically configured knowledge, and pragmatic inferencing. I'm interested in the functional architecture of the systems involved as well as in their realization in the brain. Because of this, I use both classical but proven techniques from experimental psycholinguistics (e.g., self-paced reading, questionnaires) and methods from cognitive neuroscience (EEG, MEG, fMRI).