Research at CLS

The Centre for Language Studies (CLS) aims to achieve a deeper understanding of the cognitive and social processes underlying language systems, language processing, and language use. We aspire to optimize human communicative interaction. Our approach is to investigate language from single sounds to discourse, including modalities from speech and text to gestures, signs, and images.

Mission

CLS aims to achieve a deeper understanding of the nature of language and the way it functions by explicitly connecting and integrating research on the cognitive and social processes underlying language systems, language processing, language use, and language acquisition. We actively seek to deploy our findings to optimise language-related tasks in society.

Our strategy is to conduct empirical research on language, from single sounds to discourse in multiple modalities, including speech, text, gestures, signs, and images. We highly value diversity in research techniques, applying observational, behavioural, and neurocognitive methods, as well as language and speech technology. To facilitate research, CLS invests in the collection of extensive data sets and in developing innovative automated techniques for analysing text, audio, and video.

Projects

CLS researchers are engaged in a diverse range of research projects. Presented below is a selection of our ongoing projects.

Abstract image of blue and red smoke coming together

The Language Leak

This project aims at uncovering the architecture of the multilingual sentence processing system and explaining how multilingual’s languages interact.

Speak cloud in yellow and green

Multilingual corpora

On the basis of multilingual corpora an analytical tool will be developed and tested in this project in which mode switch (as opposed to code switch) is operationalized.

Participate in our research!

We are always looking for participants. Sign up here, for online or on campus experiments:

  • Online experiments: Please visit the ROLEG web page for more information. 
  • Lab experiments: Sign up as a participant in the Radboud SONA system to take part in our lab experiments.

More information

For further information, please send an e-mail to clslab [at] let.ru.nl

CLS Talks

CLS Talks take place once a month on Thursdays at 4 pm. These colloquia showcase research done within the CLS, with the aim to increase awareness of the ongoing research in our institute, and to facilitate discussions and collaborations between researchers. In addition, we invite a number of external speakers to share their work with us. If you would like to suggest names for speakers (someone else or yourself), please get in touch with us via clstalks [at] ru.nl (clstalks[at]ru[dot]nl)

If you cannot make it in-person you are welcome to join us via Teams. The Teams link will be sent a few days before each CLS Talk to CLS members.

CLS Talks are open to all interested researchers. If you are not on the CLS mailing list but would like to receive notice about an upcoming talk, please send a message to clstalks [at] ru.nl (clstalks[at]ru[dot]nl)

CLS Talks are organized by Janine Berns, Sybrine Bultena, Kars Ligtenberg, Katharina Pabst & Laura Speed.

The most recent overview of upcoming CLS Talks can be found here:

Show CLS Talks

Education

The Centre for Language Studies (CLS) is involved in language education and in the Research Masters Linguistics and Communication Sciences and Historical, Literary and Cultural Studies at the Faculty of Arts of Radboud University.