Specialization
Within the Research Master Language and Communication offered by RU five specialization areas are distinguished, viz.
- Psycholinguistics
- Language acquisition
- Language and speech technology
- Language and society
- Communication
Each area offers a number of courses from which students can choose those that best fit their interests. In the course of the programme students are required to take a minimum of 5 elective courses (together worth at least 30 EC) from the courses that are offered as part of the Research Master’s programme Language and Communication; the courses should form a coherent set. Students may combine courses from different areas. They may wish to do so for example if they are interested in studying a particular theme (e.g. multilingualism) from different perspectives (for example, combining a psycholinguistic with a computational linguistic approach).
Students are expected to plan and organize their own study programme.
Note that the number of specialization courses to be chosen differs per semester/year:
- First year, first semester (Fall): select 2 courses, equaling at least 12 credits.
- First year, second semester (Spring): select 2 courses, equaling at least 12 credits.
- Second year, first semester (Fall): select 1 course, equaling at least 6 credits.
Students enrolled in the Language and Communication programme may also consider taking courses from the Cognitive Neuroscience (CNS; track ‘Language and Communication’) programme or Tilburg University (TiU, ReMa Language and Communication).
Students can opt to replace one specialization course (max. 6 EC) with a course from a regular Master’s programme (for example Radboud University's Linguistics or Artificial Intelligence programme, or the Tilburg Communication and Information Sciences programme). However, if they wish to do so, this must be approved by the examination board before taking the course.