Research

All programme courses taught at Radboud University are affiliated with the Centre for Language Studies (CLS). This institute is involved in nationally and internationally acclaimed cutting-edge research in the field of linguistics. The institute aims to gain a deeper understanding of the architecture of the language system and its interactions with processes at the individual and the social cultural level. Research conducted at CLS often results in valuable solutions for real-life problems in communication.

Master’s thesis topics

Your Master's thesis consists of an individual research project, which allows you to investigate a topic of your choice in linguistics and/or communication studies. The topic can be linked to or embedded in research of CLS, the Tilburg School of Humanities and digital sciences (TSHD), or another research institute on the Nijmegen campus, such as the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, or the Baby Research Center. It’s also possible to carry out a Master’s project at another university, or at a company or governmental organisation. A Master’s project and thesis will always be (co)supervised by one of our members of staff.

Examples of thesis topics that students in this programme have investigated are:

• Predictive processing and pragmatic inferencing: How does the brain deal with Dutch 'eigenlijk'?
• What general practitioners (do not) say during consultations with patients with medically unexplained symptoms: A quantitative multilevel analysis
• The role of language-specificity in the language production process model: Information structure in L1 and L2 production
• The impact of gaze direction on the comprehension of multi-modal messages: Iconic co-speech gestures may compensate for the feeling of being unaddressed
• Language choice on Facebook – An analysis of status updates and comments in polylingual spaces
• Methods for automatically generating a legal Thesaurus