Across numerous projects, we are tackling a wide range of research questions. Most of them fall into one of the following categories:
- Does language share resources with other cognitive (or perceptual / motor) abilities? What is the relationship between language and thought?
- What role do domain-general executive resources (supported by the Multiple Demand, MD, brain network) play in language comprehension and production, and in recovery from damage to the language network?
- What is the relationship between the language system and social perceptual and cognitive abilities in adult information processing, as well in development and evolution? What aspects of language comprehension (or production) require Theory of Mind mechanisms?
- What is the internal organization of the language system? Are different aspects of the linguistic signal (e.g., word meanings vs. syntactic structure) processed (in comprehension) and generated (in production) by distinct brain areas? Do different white matter tracts contribute to different aspects of language processing? How are complex linguistic meanings constructed by our brains? To what extent is language processing predictive in nature? What is the 'temporal receptive window' of the language system?
- Do individuals differ meaningfully in their comprehension and production abilities? How are these differences reflected in the brain? And do they relate to differences in our genetic make-up, including in individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders?
- How do bi- and multilingual individuals process different languages? What aspects of our experience affect neural responses to native and non-native languages?
- What aspects of the neural infrastructure of language are cross-linguistically universal, and what aspects depend on particular linguistic properties?
- How does the language system, and other cognitive systems, reorganize following early or late brain damage? Are there any constraints on reorganization? Any hemispheric biases?
- How does the language system emerge during development, and how does it change over the course of our lifetime?