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.

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.

Language and genetics

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.

Multimodal interaction

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:

Language archiving technology

LAT focuses on open accessibility of language resources and  stresses the need for long-term archiving of digital language collections.

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

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.