Faculty member

Research Interests

Our research group investigates the relationship between brain electrophysiology and the shape of human language. We follow the lead hypothesis that temporal patterns of neural information processing constrain our ability to process language, in turn fostering cross-linguistic patterns that are optimal from an information-processing perspective.

Available PhD projects

The pursuit of our hypothesis involves methodology from psycholinguistics, big-data computational linguistics, and cognitive neuroscience. We scrutinize on apparatus with high temporal resolution (i.e., task-related and resting-state magneto- and electroencephalography). Our participants are infants and children acquiring a first language, healthy young and senior adults, and patients suffering from mild forms of cognitive decline. Possible research questions to follow in the course of a doctorate in our group are:

• Do internal electrophysiological time constraints shape individual psycholinguistic processing preferences?
• Do gradients of neural excitability correspond to gradients in linguistic information content?
• Can we establish a relationship between electrophysiological processing time windows and linguistic patterns in annotated corpora?