News

  • Lowlands research
    25 June 2018

    Communicating in 3D: research at Lowlands festival

    If you want to talk to someone at a noisy festival, you probably shout or use hand gestures. What features of your movements contribute the most to understanding language? Researchers from Radboud...

  • Envisioning language
    19 June 2018

    Envisioning language

    What are the basic mechanisms of understanding language? Markus Ostarek explored to what extent the comprehension of concrete words like ‘bird’ relies on processes that are otherwise used for visual...

  • What do you actually mean?
    14 June 2018

    What do you actually mean?

    In everyday life, listeners often hear sentences with which the speaker means something different than what he or she literally said. Johanne Tromp investigated how we recognise and understand these...

  • What do you actually mean?
    14 June 2018

    What do you actually mean?

    In everyday life, listeners often hear sentences with which the speaker means something different than what he or she literally said. Johanne Tromp investigated how we recognise and understand these...

  • What a speech deficit looks like at the cellular level
    11 June 2018

    What a speech deficit looks like at the cellular level

    Some children never learn to speak as proficiently as expected. In rare cases the cause is a single mutation that has disrupted a gene in the affected child. A gene contains instructions to build a...

  • Two apes
    06 June 2018

    Scientists try to unravel the mystery of ‘animal conversations'

    African elephants like to rumble, naked mole rats trade soft chirps, while fireflies alternate flashes in courtship dialogues. Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of ‘animal conversations’. An...

  • NWO logo
    01 June 2018

    Vidi grant for Dingemanse and Martin

    Mark Dingemanse and Andrea E. Martin of the Max Plank Institute for Psycholinguistics (MPI) are each to receive up to 800,000 euros to develop an innovative research theme and to build up their own...

  • Laurel or Yanny?
    25 May 2018

    Laurel or Yanny?

    A few years ago, social media erupted in disbelief over the color of a dress. About a week ago, the auditory analogue of ‘the dress’ was posted on Reddit, Instagram, and Twitter. It’s an audio clip in...

  • Pim Levelt
    17 May 2018

    Pim Levelt, our Institute’s founder, turned 80

    On 17 May 2018, Professor Pim Levelt, psycholinguist and founder of our Institute, turned 80 years. Through Levelt’s work the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (MPI) became one of the...

  • Brain
    16 May 2018

    A new map of asymmetry in the human brain

    A research team led by the MPI for Psycholinguistics has compared a massive number of 17,141 brain scans to examine the similarity in anatomy of the left and right brain halves. The brains of people...

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