Welcome to the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
Peter Hagoort honored with Fellowship Cognitive Science Society
Dec 14, 2018
The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics is proud and happy to announce that director Peter Hagoort has been honored with a Fellowship of the Cognitive Science Society.
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Neandertal genes shed light on unique aspects of the modern human brain
Dec 13, 2018
A characteristic feature of modern humans is the unusually round skull and brain, in contrast to the elongated shape seen in other human species. By studying Neandertal DNA fragments found in the genomes of living Europeans, scientists have now discovered genes that influence this globular shape. An interdisciplinary research team, led by the Max Planck Institutes for Psycholinguistics and Evolutionary Anthropology, brought together fossil skull data, brain imaging and genomics, as reported in Current Biology.
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MPI's Sonja Vernes on Arte TV
Dec 11, 2018
The latest edition of the German/French TV programme 'Arte' features Sonja Vernes, leader of the MPI Neurogenetics of Vocal Communication research group.
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Antje Meyer elected as member of the Leopoldina
Dec 07, 2018
The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics is proud and happy to announce that director Antje Meyer has been elected to be a member of the Leopoldina.
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Learning to read comes at a cost
Nov 30, 2018
Learning how to read may have some disadvantages for learning grammar. Children who cannot read yet often treat multiword phrases as wholes (‘how-are-you’). After learning to read, children notice individual words more, as these are separated by spaces in written language (‘how are you’). The early focus on larger units may have positive effects, and explain why young children are so good at learning certain areas of grammar, say scientists from the PSL University of Paris, the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. They found that preliterate 6-year-olds were better at learning grammatical relations between words than at learning novel words in an artificial language learning study. After learning to read, these children lost their grammatical advantage.
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Researchers reveal link between job titles and gender equality
Nov 28, 2018
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (MPI) have revealed a link between role-nouns (e.g. job titles) in gendered languages and gender equality. The study, which examined whether the masculine form in the plural in German is understood as gender-neutral or as specific to males, confirms earlier findings in behavioural research: people tend to interpret the grammatically masculine form as male-specific, despite it being used regularly to refer to both males and females.
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BBC2 features 'Babies: Their Wonderful World'
Nov 18, 2018
Researchers of the ESRC LuCiD Centre will be featuring in a 3-part documentary on BBC2 called 'Babies: Their Wonderful World'. The first episode airs on BBC2 on Monday 26th November at 9pm.
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IMPRS students publish winning article on NEMO Kennislink
Nov 14, 2018
For the annual writing course ‘Current Issues in the Language Sciences’ graduate students of the IMPRS for Language Sciences are judged on an article written for the general audience. The winning article of this year’s competition - written by Cohort 2017 members Gert-Jan Schoenmakers, Merel Postema and Katja Stärk - got recently published on the Dutch popular scientific website NEMO Kennislink.
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