A neurodevelopmental approach to human language processing

Project Information

NEURODEVELOPMENT

Grant agreement ID: 209656

Project closed

Start date 1 September 2008

End date 31 August 2014

Funded under

• Specific programme: "Ideas" implementing the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Community for research, technological development and demonstration activities (2007 to 2013)

Total cost € 822 000,00

EU contribution € 822 000,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITAET HAMBURG
Germany

Objective

Despite a large number of studies on human language comprehension and its development, the neurocognitive system underlying normal and impaired language processing has yet not been characterized. In particular, it is currently debated whether different subsystems in language comprehension work together in a serial or a parallel fashion. The grant project will use online measures of neuronal activity as revealed by the recording of event-related brain potentials (ERPs), to test a new account to human language processing that emerges from a neurodevelopmental perspective. Specifically, the proposal is guided by the hypothesis that adult language processing is characterized by simultaneously activated neurorepresentational systems at different stages of language comprehension, but that these parallel neuronal networks are acquired sequentially during infancy and childhood. Using ERPs recorded in a series of fragment priming experiments, evidence for the proposed neurodevelopmental model of language comprehension will be obtained in infants, children and adults. Additional analysis techniques, such as the characterization of temporal dynamics of ERPs, will be applied to investigate the assumed functional parallelism in neuronal language processing. The results will serve as a basis for a neurolinguistic model of both language acquisition and the functional organization of the adult language processing system. The work will be of importance for questions of education and for the understanding and treatment of developmental language disorders.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.

• humanities › languages and literature › general language studies
• social sciences › psychology › psycholinguistics

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Keywords

• Language
• Language acquisition
• acquisition

Programme(s)

• FP7-IDEAS-ERC - Specific programme: "Ideas" implementing the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Community for research, technological development and demonstration activities (2007 to 2013)

Topic(s)

• ERC-SG-SH3 - ERC Starting Grant - Environment and society

Call for proposal

ERC-2007-StG
See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

ERC-SG - ERC Starting Grant

Host institution

UNIVERSITAET HAMBURG

• EU contribution: € 822 000,00
• Address: MITTELWEG 177 ; 20148 HAMBURG ; Germany
• Activity type: Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
• Total cost: No data

Beneficiaries (1)

UNIVERSITAET HAMBURG

Germany

• EU contribution: € 822 000,00
• Address: MITTELWEG 177 ; 20148 HAMBURG
• Activity type: Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
• Total cost: No data