Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics is a world-leading research institute devoted to interdisciplinary studies of the science of language and communication, including departments on genetics, psychology, development, neurobiology and multimodality of these fundamental human abilities.
This Institute is entirely devoted to psycholinguistics – the study of how we produce and understand language and how we acquire these skills as first or second-language learners. Language plays a central role in human affairs and disciplines. Researchers at the institute investigate how children and adults acquire their language(s), how speaking and listening happen in real time, how the brain processes language, how the human genome contributes to building a language-ready brain, how multiple modalities (as in speech, gesture and sign) shape language and its use in diverse languages and how language is related to cognition and culture, and shaped by evolution.
The departments
The Institute comprises five departments: Language and Genetics, Language Development, Psychology of Language, Neurobiology of Language and Multimodal Language. Since two of the Steering Committee members, Caroline Rowland and Aslı Özyürek, are the respective heads of the Language Development department and the Multimodal language department, the research and research exchanges conducted in the framework of the MEDAL will be tightly linked to those two domains.
The Language Development Department is concerned with how children learn languages. Research themes conducted in this department include tracking how children’s knowledge of language changes as children age, comparing results across different languages, cultures and multicultural environments and testing theories and models with multi-methodological research designs, including computational modelling, corpus analysis, and behavioural and neurocognitive lab-based experiments.
The Multimodal Language Department aims to understand how visual features of language, along with speech or in sign languages, constitute a fundamental aspect of the human language capacity, contributing to its unique flexible and adaptive nature. The ambition of the department is to conventionalise the view of language and linguistics as multimodal phenomena.
The Max Planck Society
The MPI for Psycholinguistics is part of the Max Planck Society, an independent non-governmental association of German-funded research institutes dedicated to fundamental research in the natural sciences, life sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. Max Planck Institutes are research institutions that are part of the Max Planck Society, a German research organization. There are over 80 research institutes, most of them located in Germany. The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen is one of the few located outside of Germany. More than 200 people work at the MPI in Nijmegen, including PhD students, researchers, and support staff.