Donders Institute, Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging
The Netherlands has an outstanding track record in the language sciences. The Language in Interaction research consortium, which is sponsored by a large grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific research (NWO), brings together many of the excellent research groups in the Netherlands in a research programme on the foundations of language. In addition to excellence in the domain of language and related relevant fields of cognition, our consortium provides state-of-the-art research facilities and a research team with ample experience in the complex research methods that will be invoked to address the scientific questions at the highest level of methodological sophistication. These include methods from genetics, neuroimaging, computational modelling, and patient-related research. This consortium realises both quality and critical mass for studying human language at a scale not easily found anywhere else.
We have identified five Big Questions (BQ) that are central to our understanding of the human language faculty. These questions are interrelated at multiple levels. Teams of researchers will collaborate to collectively address these key questions of our field.
Our five Big Questions are:
BQ1: The nature of the mental lexicon: How to bridge neurobiology and psycholinguistic theory by computational modelling?
BQ2: What are the characteristics and consequences of internal brain organisation for language?
BQ3: Creating a shared cognitive space: How is language grounded in and shaped by communicative settings of interacting people?
BQ4: Variability in language processing and in language learning: Why does the ability to learn language change with age? How can we characterise and map individual language skills in relation to the population distribution?
BQ5: How are other cognitive systems shaped by the presence of a language system in humans?
You will be appointed at the Donders Institute, Centre for Cognition (Radboud University, Nijmegen). The project is embedded in the Donders Institute’s research theme ‘Brain Networks and Neuronal Communication’ and will be supervised by Prof. Marcel van Gerven. The research is conducted in an international setting at all participating institutions. English is the lingua franca.
No commercial propositions please.
http://www.languageininteraction.nl/ ; www.ru.nl/donders/