We are looking for highly motivated candidates to enrich a unique consortium of researchers that aims to cross the boundaries of various disciplines to unravel the neurocognitive mechanisms of language and its interaction with other cognitive systems. This specific project aims to advance our understanding of the mechanisms of fast, flexible linguistic inference by leveraging recent major advances in our understanding of the representations and computations necessary for sequential model-based action planning.
 
Currently, our consortium advertises 2 Postdoc positions and 1 PhD position. These positions provide the opportunity for conducting world-class research as a member of an interdisciplinary team.

Each position has its own requirements and profile.
More information on: www.languageininteraction.nl/BQ5-3p.html
 
General requirements for all positions are:
• a degree in linguistics, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, computer science or a related field;
• affinity with quantitative analyses;
• strong motivation;
• excellent proficiency in written and spoken English.

• employment: 1.0 FTE
• terms of employment depend on the position applied for
• you will be appointed at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University
• Dutch universities and the institute involved have a number of regulations in place that enable employees to create a good work-life balance
• you will be able to make use of our Dual Career Service where our Dual Career Officer will assist with family related support, such as child care, and help your partner prepare for the local labour market and with finding an occupation

 
The institute involved is an equal opportunity employer, committed to building a culturally diverse intellectual community, and as such encourages applications from women and minorities.

Are you interested in our excellent employment conditions?

Dutch Research Consortium 'Language in Interaction'
The Netherlands has an outstanding track record in the language sciences. The Language in Interaction research consortium, sponsored by a large grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), brings together many of the excellent research groups in the Netherlands with 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: Inference for language and action planning: Common computations?
 
All successful candidates will become members of our Big Question teams. The research is conducted in an international setting at all participating institutions. English is the lingua franca.
 
Further information on the Language in Interaction Consortium
Further information on the different positions, including terms of employment
Further information on our five Big Questions