The Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition (LIBC) is concentrating increasingly on research into the role of the brain in language development. The institute has now set up the LIBC Language website that brings together all the information on this research.

This dissertation the role of the English dissenting minister Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) as a grammarian is studied.

On the 29th of June, Martin Kohlberger successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Martin on this achievement!

On December 6th, Bob Schoemaker succesfully defended his doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Bob on this great result.

On the 16th of June, Ndokobai Dadak successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Ndokobai on this achievement!

A new challenge for Felix Ameka. The senior lecturer at the Centre for Linguistics has been appointed professor by special appointment of Ethnolinguistic Vitality and Diversity in the World. ‘I am looking forward to promoting ethnolinguistic diversity and vitality.’

More than a thousand 17th- and 18th-century Dutch letters from seized ships are now available online. The letters are a gold mine for researchers wanting to study the everyday language used by men and women during this period.

From 17 to 19 September, the University of Granada organized the 27th International Conference of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature (SELIM).

A century ago, the French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure proposed that the relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning is fundamentally arbitrary. In a new study, a team of researchers from European and American research institutions, including Søren Wichmann from Leiden University Centre…

The Leiden University Center for Linguistics (LUCL) will organise Going Romance 2019 on November 28-29, 2019.

In both the autumn and the spring semesters, full bachelor’s programmes worth 30 ECTS are offered. Besides these study programmes, NIMAR provides an honours track for bachelor’s students from various disciplinary backgrounds and contributes to study trips to Rabat.

No fewer than three Leiden University Humanities scholars have been awarded funding from the NWO’s Free Competition in the Humanities programme: two grants of 750,000 euros and one of 705,000 euros. In total, twelve researchers have received a grant in the NWO Social Sciences and Humanities domain.

Researcher Max van Duijn and PhD student Bram van Dijk apply language models to stories told by children to investigate empathy. For this research, they received the Best Paper Award at the Computational Natural Language Learning Conference in Singapore.

Professor Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade has been awarded a fellowship at Clare College at the University of Cambridge from February to August 2011. She will use the opportunity to pursue her research on the relationship between the history of grammar writing and actual usage.

Vocal learning is a trait shared by songbirds and humans. It is also a trait that is restricted by the brain rather than by a species' vocal apparatus. In this dissertation, functional MRI is employed in both species in order to explore potential common neural mechanisms underlying the ability to develop…

Our courses September courses start soon, be sure to apply in time

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How did nineteenth-century non-Anglophone translators and authors creatively engage with the poem Beowulf?

Antonia Lamers, PhD at ICLON, researched how to create a TNE teaching and learning environment that is in line with the expectations of the British programmes offered to students in Oman.

The Netherlands Institute in Turkey (NIT) conducts scholarly research and supports the academic study of Turkey through the ages. The institute is closely affiliated with University’s Faculty of Humanities. Its facilities are available to students and staff of all universities in the Netherlands.

Psychologist Bernou Melisse was shocked at the long waiting lists in the Netherlands for people with binge-eating disorders. The problem was not yet on the map in Saudi Arabia. She therefore decided to study how people suffering from binge eating can be helped better in their own region of the world.…

The prehistory of communication metaphors

'Psychologists think I’m a linguist but linguists think I’m a psychologist,' says cognitive neuroscientist Xiaochen Zheng. With the Veni grant she will be able to bring these two fields of research closer together. Read her answers to five questions.

Professor Sjef Barbiers is leaving his job as scientific director of LUCL for the position of scientific director of the Institute for the Dutch Language (INT) from 1 September.

Prof. Dr. Willem Adelaar has been elected as Honorary member of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA)

As of this October, linguist Roberta D'Alessandro is appointed as Member of the International Council for Science (ICSU) Committee on Freedom and Responsibility in the conduct of Science (CFRS).

Tingting Hui started her PhD project at LUCAS in September 2015. Her promotors will be Ernst van Alphen and Yasco Horsman from the Literary Studies department.

The Academic Language Centre is part of the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) and provides language services to students and staff of Leiden University and the Leiden University Medical Centre.

In the 19th century, Old English poems were claimed as cultural heritage by various non-Anglophone nations, including Scandinavians, Germans and Dutch. These competing nationalistic, cultural appropriations happened against the backdrop of a growing interest in early medieval English language and literature…

The Leiden Center for the Study of Ancient Arabia (LeiCenSAA) announces a new open access, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the epigraphy of Arabia and its cultural and linguistic context: Arabian Epigraphic Notes

What motivates learners in bilingual education to learn English and how can and do teaching practices contribute to that motivation?

Words originally intended to indicate space, such as ‘out’, are also regularly used to indicate cause and effect. Why does this happen? And how does it work in other languages? PhD candidate Camil Staps decided to find out.

University lecturer Alex Reuneker has won the Frans van Eemeren Prize for his paper 'Assessing classification reliability of conditionals in discourse'.

Leiden Anglicist Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade is one of the seventeen new members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Tieken is Professor of Historical Sociolingusitics of English.

The Leiden Papyrological Institute is the only papyrological institute in the Netherlands, and one of the few institutes in the world where study of Greek and Demotic Egyptian is combined. This is reflected in both teaching and research. Members of the Institute are active in publishing texts from various…

By making smart use of available data, the health and care of people can be substantially improved. Marco Spruit wants to use language and machine learning in the coming years to identify and solve the biggest care issues in the region of The Hague. He has been appointed Professor of Advanced Data Science…

The city centre of Leiden is covered in them: wall poems. When roaming around, you come across poetry written in the Latin alphabet, but also in scripts that might be more difficult to understand for the average person living in Leiden. In a new series of videos, Tijmen Pronk talks more about this.

Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade has received a special award: the Order of St. Mellitus, in recognition of her services to the history of the Bishops of London.

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