ERC Starting Grants are awarded annually to talented young scientists with more than two but less than seven years of experience since completion of their PhD. The recipients at Radboud University will be conducting research into language acquisition, the green transition in agriculture, the detection of young planets, and the occult.
PredLang
A longitudinal approach to mapping prediction’s role in language acquisition, door Judit Fazekas (Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging)
Learning to communicate with others is one of our most important achievements in childhood. Yet due to the difficulty of investigating language use in the earliest years of life, we still know surprisingly little about the cognitive mechanisms that enable the language acquisition process. The most influential current theories suggest that language learning hinges on prediction, the ability to anticipate upcoming input. These theories – collectively known as the error-based theories of language acquisition – describe a powerful and dynamic mechanism mapping the steps from exposure to language to becoming competent and creative users of it. Yet while these theories are popular, the empirical assessment of prediction-based language acquisition theories is still in its infancy.
PredLang takes advantage of recent innovations in the neuroimaging of predictive processing and combines them with established approaches from developmental psycholinguistics to conduct a longitudinal investigation into prediction’s role in language learning. By linking children’s predictive abilities in both ideal and naturalistic contexts with wider language outcomes on an individual and cohort basis, PredLang will address three core objectives:
O1 – Determine when children start making predictions at different linguistic levels.
O2 – Assess whether such predictions occur during naturalistic listening.
O3 – Map connections between predictive abilities and language knowledge measures.
Achieving these objectives will resolve the key outstanding empirical questions surrounding error-based theories, and offer the first comprehensive assessment of the potential scope and function of a predictive learning mechanism. The results will shape the next generation of language acquisition research seeking to refine or replace these learning models, with wider implications for connected fields such as predictive processing and LLM-based cognitive modelling.
Occult Atlantic
Chasing Higher Knowledge in North America, the Caribbean, and West Africa, door Justine Bakker (Faculteit der Filosofie, Theologie en Religiewetenschappen)
Black Jews in the US, Hindus in Trinidad, and Vodu priests in Ghana: people across the Black and Brown Atlantic use occult books, in innovative, creative ways. Such usage is often policed, ridiculed, or demonized. Scholars pay little attention to these developments. Occultism studies centres the West and Asia. Scholars of Africana and Caribbean religion are concerned that a focus on such books obscures local agency or reinforces the racialized link between blackness and irrationality. Yet, occult books have been crucial to religion, identity- and community-formation, knowledge production, and subjugation across the Atlantic. This provokes two questions. How and why have occult books become a site of the production, negotiation, and contestation of knowledge, power, race, and community? What does this tell us about the intersection of colonialism, emancipation, and occultism?
Because of the books’ clandestine and controversial status, scholars seeking answers face complicated challenges. OCCULTATLANTIC addresses these by developing a comprehensive and innovative approach. It focuses on the historical and contemporary circulation, use, and regulation of one corpus: occult books published by De Laurence, Scott, and Co. It does so across North America, the Caribbean, and West Africa, since 1900. It combines archival research, participant and digital ethnography, and GIS-mapping, and brings together insights from religious and Black studies, global history of science, and book- and reception history.
OCCULTATLANTIC projects four new horizons. It 1) redraws the religious map of the Black and Brown Atlantic, by showing and exploring innovative usages of occult books; 2) introduces a new mixed method approach to study the global occult; 3) creates a GIS-map that can become a major touchpoint for future researchers of religious networks; and 4) develops a theoretical model for an improved understanding of the relation between colonialism, emancipation, and occultism.
Stormy Adolescence
Detecting young planets through magnetic star-planet interaction, door Ekaterina Ilin (Institute for Mathematics, Astrophysics and Particle Physics)
Young planets orbiting close to their host stars experience extreme space weather during a critical early evolutionary window that determines their long-term atmospheric survival. Ilin's recent discovery of planet-induced flaring in the young star-planet system HIP 67522 reveals a new phenomenon where close-in planets trigger massive stellar flares that boomerang radiation back onto the planet, accelerating atmospheric loss.
Ilin's project will determine whether such magnetic star-planet interactions represent a universal evolutionary phase or a rare occurrence by conducting the first systematic population survey of approximately 10,000 young stars using high-precision time-domain photometry. No planets are known to orbit these stars a priori, so that detecting interaction will simultaneously give away the presence of a close-in companion. Ilin and her team will thus develop a novel planet detection method exploiting flare clustering patterns to identify interacting systems without prior knowledge of planetary orbits, potentially discovering up to 200 new young exoplanets and increasing the known population by two orders of magnitude. Multiwavelength follow-up observations of known and detected systems will test against a set of promising interaction mechanisms.
Whether we detect many interacting planets or establish stringent upper limits, this project will definitively answer if flaring interaction is a universal phase of planetary evolution. At the same time, we will deliver the first comprehensive star-by-star database of flaring activity evolution, essential for modeling planetary atmospheric escape across the exoplanet field.
LandLogics
Property and the Green Transition in Europe, door Adam Calo (Institute of Management Research)
The ambition of sustainable land use transitions in developed economies has been met with considerable resistance. This project contends that the difficulty to transition farming practices, site renewable energy, and restore degraded land stems from legally entrenched and socially accepted norms of property. Visions for a sustainable future will remain incomplete unless they grapple with what appears to be a settled property regime—the way land is governed, transferred, and contested.
Current work on sustainability transitions and environmental governance offers little insight into how property regimes condition the feasibility and legitimacy of new land uses. LANDLOGICS reframes property from a neutral backdrop to an explanatory variable in transition theory. The central question is: How do property relations condition sustainable land-use pathways?
The project pursues four objectives: (1) Map how property regimes exert influence across the green transition domains of energy, food systems, and land restoration; (2) analyze incumbent logics—how actors (e.g., legacy landowners) leverage legal, discursive, and institutional dimensions of property to resist or redirect transition agendas; (3) analyze countervailing logics—how coalitions (e.g., land trusts) mobilize legal tools, social narratives, and institutional innovations to contest property regimes and reconfigure land relations; and (4) theorize the conditions under which new property regimes gain legitimacy and traction.
Methodologically, the project combines a pan-European meta-analysis with multi-sited socio-legal research of law in practice across key cases. The outcome will generate a new conceptual land governance framework for understanding the legal, social, and institutional conditions under which sustainable land governance can emerge and thrive.