Dr. Eirini Zormpa was a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. She defended her thesis entitled ‘Memory for speaking and listening’ on December 18 2020.
With online group classes, self-paced mobile apps and dedicated Youtube channels, learning a new language never seemed easier. The opportunities seem endless—perhaps even overwhelmingly so. Although, learning a new language is more than just learning new words for the same things. Sometimes, there are also new meanings to be learned.
Dr. Saoradh Favier was a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. She defended her thesis entitled ‘Individual differences in syntactic knowledge and processing: Exploring the role of literacy experience’ on December 10 2020.
Dr. René Terporten was a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. He defended his thesis entitled ‘The Power of Context: How linguistic contextual information shapes brain dynamics during sentence processing’ on October 2 2020.
In my previous post, I wrote about recursion – self-same replication, when a rule or procedure is applied to its own successive results. Some linguists argue that recursion is a defining aspect of human language: our grammar allows us to combine words into more complex structures, which are in their turn combined into even more complex structures, similar to Matryoshka dolls. I, however, argued that recursion in grammar does not quite live up to its current central status in theory of language as this hierarchical use of rules is present in most if not all aspects of life. But does this mean that recursion is something trivial and boring? By no means! Like a magic wand, it allows us, notoriously social animals, to understand and communicate with each other in a very efficient and flexible way.
