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. W. Daelemans (University of Antwerp)
- Prof. L. Degand (UCL, Louvain-la-Neuve)
- Prof. L. Kivallik (Linköping University)
- Prof. A. Majid (University of Oxford)
- Prof. M. Verspoor (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)
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.
Mission Statement
Language Science that Matters.
Uniquely positioned on one of the strongest campuses in linguistics worldwide, CLS is a research institute that performs top quality language and communication research on pressing scientific questions that matter societally. Our research strives to achieve a deeper understanding of the nature of language and the way it functions. CLS has a keen eye on impact in relevant societal domains such as education and digitalization, and CLS researchers are solidly embedded in the educational programs of the Faculty of Arts. We value training students to become familiarized with the latest academic insights and what they mean for society at large. The many text corpora and software tools we develop contribute to achieving central research aims for CLS and the larger academic community, and we have a strong track record in AI driven language and speech technology as an instrument and an object of research. Striving for a deeper understanding of what underlies language systems, language processing, and language use, CLS researchers examine three big questions (Appendix B):
1) How are language systems structured and how do they evolve? We study typological, regional, and historical differences between languages and their varieties, and how social and cognitive factors contribute to language structure, variation and change.
2) How do humans and machines acquire languages? We examine the factors and processes underlying language acquisition in first, second, foreign and multi-language contexts by human learners of all ages in naturalistic and educational settings, and we examine the possibilities and boundaries of computers in simulating these processes.
3) How do human communication and cognition interact? We investigate the structure, meaning, functions, and modalities of language in social interaction. We examine language processing and communication effects on cognition and behavior in healthy persons and individuals with an impairment, in interpersonal, organizational, and digital contexts.
Departing from the perspective that today’s complex problems cannot be solved by language and communication scientists alone, CLS has strong and collegial ties with several renowned institutes on campus and beyond. In Nijmegen, CLS is a full partner of the Donders Network Institute, a collaboration between six different institutes on the Radboud campus, among which the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (MPI). Within this network, CLS researchers collaborate in the Language and Communication theme and with the Baby & Child Research Center. More recently, CLS has partnered up with iHub, the interdisciplinary Hub for research on digitalisation in several research projects. CLS also shares research interests and project with the institute Radboud Institute for Culture & History (RICH), Radboudumc, and the Behavioural Science Institute (BSI). Globally, CLS’ collaboration network spans more than 40 countries and 200 institutions.
