Director and coordinators
Prof. Enny Das is the director of CLS. She works closely with coordinators Dr Mirjam Broersma, Dr Mark Dingemanse en Dr Sharon Unsworth.
Scientific advisory board
The scientific advisory board, consisting of (inter)national researchers who are excellent representatives of our field, has an advisory and supervisory role for research planning, science education, data management, communication and outreach.
- Prof. M. Verspoor (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)
- Prof. W. Daelemans (University of Antwerp)
- Prof. L. Degand (UCL, Louvain-la-Neuve)
- Prof. A. Majid (University of York)
Partners
CLS collaborates with research institutes in the Netherlands and abroad. We work most intensively with the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour (DBCB), the Behavioural Science Institute (BSI), and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (MPI), all housed on the Nijmegen campus. Several CLS researchers are also affiliated with the MPI or DBCB.
Apart from the numerous informal contacts between researchers, the four institutes collaborate in the DBCB Language and Communication theme, the NWO Gravitation Programme Language in Interaction, and in the Baby & Child Research Center.
In addition, CLS closely collaborates with the research institute Radboud Institute for Culture & History (RICH) and the faculty for Philosophy, Theology and Religious studies (PTR), as well as with the Radboudumc, especially the Department of Speech Therapy.
Themes
A deeper understanding of what underlies language systems, language processing, and language use is what we strive for: we aspire to optimize human communicative interaction by investigating language from single sounds to discourse, from speech and text to gestures, signs, and images. We focus on four research areas:
Language systems and language variation
Our analysis of language systems focuses on the typological, regional, and historical differences between languages and their varieties, and we study how social and cognitive factors contribute to language variation and change.
Language processing and cognition
We investigate how the structure, meaning, and modality of language affects language processing and cognition. Our research includes the study of language users with speech, language or hearing-related impairments.
Discourse and communication
In our analyses of the structure and function of discourse in social and organisational contexts, including mass and social media, we study the impact of lexical, grammatical, stylistic, and interactional factors in native and non-native communication.
First and second language acquisition
We study the factors and processes underlying language acquisition in first, second, foreign and multi-language contexts by learners of all ages in both naturalistic and educational settings.
