Projects

Research on how the human brain processes language has mostly focused on a very small set of familiar, related European languages like English, Dutch, German, Spanish and French. We know almost nothing about how the brains of speakers of most of the world’s languages respond to even simple linguistic tasks like processing a single word. This project investigates how speakers of a diverse range of languages solve the basic problem of detecting, recognising and interpreting constituent pieces of complex words, by recording their brain activity while they read and judge the wellformedness of familiar and novel words in their language. By employing a very simple paradigm, that can be replicated across all the languages in our sample, we can both better understand the shared neurocognitive bases for the human language capacity, while also uncovering the neurobiological basis for the distribution of different linguistic patterns across the languages of the world. The systematic comparison of the responses evoked by the same manipulations across a range of languages will lead to new discoveries and to the refinement of existing models of how word-internal linguistic structure is parsed.