MPI-PL Archive
The Language Acquisition Department was headed by Wolfgang Klein from 1980 until 2015. The corpora of the Language Acquisition Group include first (L1) as well as second language (L2) acquisition data from children and adults.
Content: First (L1) & second language (L2) acquisition data, longitudinal & snapshot data, children & adults data, control data of native speakers of different languages, spontaneous and elicited data, partly transcribed and annotated data, additional info files (e.g. project or language description).
Data of following languages are available:
Czech (L1 & L2) - Chinese (L1) - Dutch (L2) - English (L1 & L2) - French (L2) - German (L1 & L2) - Hindi (L1) - Russian (L1) - Swedish (L2) - Tamil (L1) - Tzeltal (L1)
This former MPI group, led by Ulf Liszkowski, conducted research into the social and cognitive foundations of human communication in infancy.
The Comparative Bioacoustics group, led by Andrea Ravignani, investigates why humans and some other species are so skilled at vocal learning and rhythm, and how these capacities underlying speech and music may have evolved.
The Comparative Cognitive Anthropology research group, led by Daniel Haun, was a collaboration between the Max Planck Institutes for Psycholinguistics and Evolutionary Anthropology. It aimed to explore how patterns of human cultural variation are related to variable cognitive function, and to determine the underlying set of psychological mechanisms that allow and stabilise humans' exceptional cross-cultural variability.
The Comprehension Department was headed by Anne Cutler from 1993 until 2013. The group focused on the comprehension of spoken language and how this process is affected by phonological structure of the native language.
This independent research group, led by Michael Dunn, investigated language diversity and change as part of an integrated cultural evolutionary system.
The researchers of the Language Development department, led by Caroline Rowland, build and test models of language acquisition that address the central question: How do the learning mechanisms in children’s brains use information in their environment to build mature linguistic knowledge?
The Language and Cognition Department was headed by Stephen C. Levinson from 1994 until 2017. The Department investigated the relationship between language, culture and general cognition, making use of the "natural laboratory" of language variation. Its corpora contain spontaneous, elicited and experimental language data.
The focus of the Language and Computation in Neural Systems research group, led by Andrea Martin, is to understand the computational principles and mechanisms that underlie the representation and processing of human language. Its aim is to develop a theory about how the brain generates human language that is based on principles from across the language sciences, the cognitive and computational sciences, and neuroscience -- and to do so in a way that stays faithful to the constraints on neural computation, to the formal properties of language, and to human behavior.
The Language and Genetics Department, led by Simon E. Fisher, aims to uncover the DNA variations which ultimately affect different facets of our communicative abilities, not only in children with language-related disorders but also in the general population. In addition, the Department hopes to trace the evolutionary history and worldwide diversity of key genes, which may shed new light on language origins.
Data for the corpora of the Multilingualism Group at the MPI for Psycholinguistics (Nijmegen, NL), including elicited data from adult learners and bi- or multilingual speakers from the following languages:
English, Japanese, French, Dutch, Papiamentu, Turkish and German.
The focus of the Neurobiology of Language Department, led by Peter Hagoort, is on the study of language production, language comprehension, and language acquisition from a cognitive neuroscience perspective.
The Neurogenetics of Vocal Communication group, led by Sonja Vernes, is studying vocal communication in mammals, as a way to understand the biological basis of human speech and language and how this trait evolved.
The goal of the Psychology of Language department, led by Antje Meyer, is to generate parsimonious, yet sufficiently detailed and comprehensive models of all the different ways we use language in everyday contexts.
Sign Language Typology collections, most of which were created within the Sign Language Typology research group at the MPI for Psycholinguistics lead by Ulrike Zeshan between 2003 and 2006.