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How does learning to read change our brain? Does reading take up brain space dedicated to seeing objects such as faces, tools or houses? In a functional brain imaging study reported in Science…

The MPI is proud and happy to announce that Senior Investigator Evan Kidd has been named Australia’s leading researcher in Language and Linguistics. The prolific Australian-born linguist is an expert…

Language involves many different regions of the brain. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and the Donders Institute at Radboud University discovered previously hidden…

In a review article published in Science, Peter Hagoort, professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Radboud University and director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, argues for a new…

Sometimes described as a blending of the senses, synaesthesia is an unusual trait where exposure to a triggering stimulus (e.g. music or letters of the alphabet) causes an immediate additional…

De IMPRS voor Taalwetenschappen traint studenten om te schrijven over taalonderzoek voor het grote publiek middels een jaarlijkse schrijfwedstrijd. De IMPRS-studenten krijgen les van…

Do people with autism have differently organised brains? A large-scale MRI study, published in Nature Communications, reports fewer differences between the right and left hemispheres in people with…

On Thursday 12th of December 2019, at 11.00, Merel Maslowski will defend her thesis entitled "Fast speech can sound slow: Effects of contextual speech rate on word recognition" in the Senaatszaal of…

MPI researchers Mark Dingemanse, Francisco Torreira and Nick Enfield have won a coveted Ig Nobel Prize for their work which shows that ‘Huh?’—a word people use when they missed what someone just said…

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…