Study programme Linguistics and Communication Sciences year 1

Elective courses are courses that you choose to take as part of a predetermined list of courses within your degree programme.

Specialisation courses

For this part of the programme, you get to decide on your own selection of courses. The most important criterion is that the courses form a coherent set, linked to a focus area in which you would like to be a specialist. To help you in your selection, the programme offers a list of possible courses that are related to different areas within the fields of linguistics and communication sciences:

Language Processing and Acquisition

We offer various courses that deal with how humans comprehend spoken and written language, how language learners learn a second language, what the role is of gestures and signs, and how non-verbal communication takes place.
Go to Language Processing and Acquisition course list

Language and Speech Technology

You can focus on the computational modelling and automatic processing of language and speech. More than any other field in linguistics, this field is driven by technology, and is at the forefront of computational modelling, big data, and machine learning.
Go to Language and Speech Technology course list

Communication and Language Behaviour

Language use varies between different groups in society. This field studies, for example, issues of language choice in particular communicative settings, but also aspects of the communication process itself, particularly the role of social media and digital media. In addition there are courses that investigate the social-psychological, or cognitive, effects of different communication patterns.
Go to Communication and Language Behaviour course list

Self-constructed focus areas

Students are also free to come up with their own focus area, choosing research Master’s courses at Radboud University or Tilburg University that relate to it. Such an area could be, for example, Multilingualism for which you then can take courses that offer a different perspective on this topic, combining courses from different focus areas.

Skills and methods electives (12 EC in total)

The research programme offers training in various skills like academic writing and programming, and various methods like data analysis and statistics. You get to choose your own courses here. There is one exception: students lacking a basic knowledge of statistics are required to take the course Introductory Statistics for Linguistic Research.