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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.

 

Research projects


Virtually all of our current research is organized in the Institute Projects listed below (with many of them involving multiple research groups):

Categories across language and cognition

This project is concerned with the nature of categories and concepts in language, in non-linguistic perception and cognition, and the relationship between them.

Cognomics

The Cognomics initiative aims to establish a large resource of thousands of participants from the general population, for tracing the connections between genes, brains and cognition.

Coordination of cognitive systems

This project investigates the relationship between language comprehension and production and other cognitive processes, including attention, vision, and working memory.

Individual differences project

The project aims to describe how people are similar and how they differ in their ways of speaking and understanding spoken language and to explain how these differences arise.

Research on the complex interplay between genes and language at different levels and time scales.

Mechanisms and representations in comprehending speech

Research on theoretical issues in speech comprehension.

Interactional foundations of language

This project investigates language in its primordial context – face-to-face conversational interaction – the context in which language is learnt, and predominantly used.

Language in action

Cognitive neuroscience research on the architecture of the language system as it operates in rich social, physical, or discourse contexts.

Unification

Research on how different sources of information (retrieved from memory or provided by sensory input) are unified with language into an interpretation (comprehension) or message (production).

 

Externally funded research projects:

The Language Archive

TLA's aim is to store and preserve digital language resources, to give access to researchers and other interested users and to develop and integrate new technologies advancing language research.

Language documentation and data mining

Research focussed on the documentation of endangered or under-described languages on the one hand, and the exploitation of this kind of data for linguistic theory and analysis on the other hand.

 

Recently concluded projects:

Research projects that have finished

Information structure in language acquisition

Research on the linguistic realization of information structure and its acquisition by children and adults in a variety of languages.

The dynamics of multilingual processing

This project (funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research 2003-2007) studies the processing of second and third languages (L2+) during first contact, during acquisition, and at the level of high proficiency or functional bilingualism.

 




Last checked 2011-10-31 by Rian Zondervan

Max Planck Institute
for Psycholinguistics


Street address
Wundtlaan 1
6525 XD Nijmegen
The Netherlands


Mailing address
P.O. Box 310
6500 AH Nijmegen
The Netherlands

Phone:   +31-24-3521911
Fax:        +31-24-3521213
E-mail:   

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