Postdoctoral Researcher: Connecting Knowledge of the Language in Interaction Consortium to International Collaborations

The Netherlands has an outstanding track record in the language sciences.

The Language in Interaction research consortium

, sponsored by a large grant from the Dutch Research Council (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 has 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. Our consortium realizes 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 organization 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 characterize 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 Cognitive Neuroimaging (Radboud University, Nijmegen). The research is conducted in an international setting at all participating institutions. English is the lingua franca. 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.