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.

Language and genetics project

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.