Search results

We are happy to announce that world-renowned philosopher Professor Daniel C. Dennett has accepted to deliver the Nijmegen Lectures about Autonomy, Language, and Consciousness on October 15 and 16,…

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…

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…

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…

At the MPI, we strive to guide and train the next generation of academics. This week, four young researchers are placed in the spotlight after winning awards at an international level. Their awarded…

On behalf of NWO, the Dutch Minister Ingrid van Engelshoven has awarded 13.8 million euro to a humanities consortium including the MPI - for the development of CLARIAH PLUS, a national digital…

Elena Lieven of Manchester University gave an unprecedentedly comprehensive view on research on child language development, which triggered stimulating expert discussions during the 37th edition of…

On the 17th December 2017, Peter Hagoort - managing director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics - held a public lecture on humans' unique ability for the use of language in Paradiso,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

The prestigious US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has elected Peter Hagoort, managing director at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Radboud…

From a research perspective, reading and writing is a fascinating phenomenon. After all, the first writing systems date back less than 6,000 years – the blink of an eye in the timescale of human…

How speaking fast is like running: modelling control of speaking rate

Neurobiological models of sentence processing

Why do children learn words? "Babies learn words from early on. They also learn more words faster, the older they get. Nevertheless, there are differences in both the number and kinds of words known…

Taalonderzoek bij kinderen: hoe doe je dat? Ben je geïnteresseerd in hoe baby's en jonge kinderen taal leren? Wil je meer weten over de ontwikkeling van ander communicatief gedrag, zoals wijzen of…

On Wednesday 8th of July 2020, at 12.30, Svetlana Gerakaki will defend her thesis entitled "The moment in between: Planning speech while listening".