The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (MPI) at Nijmegen is part of the German Max Planck Gesellschaft and one of the few MPI’s outside Germany. From its inception, the Institute has been devoted to interdisciplinary research into the foundations of language and communication, investigating how we produce and understand language and how we acquire the relevant skills to do so.
The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics was officially launched in 1980 under the leadership of its Founding Director Prof. Willem Levelt, a foremost authority on psycholinguistics and psychophysics. Nurturing its multidisciplinary profile, the Institute soon developed into a research facility that combines the perspectives and approaches of an increasing variety of academic disciplines, including linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, genetics, anthropology, informatics, medicine, and acoustics. The Institute investigates for example how the brain processes language, how speaking and understanding materialize in realtime, how humans acquire language, how the human genome contributes to building a language-ready brain, and how language is related to cognition and culture, and shaped by evolution.
The uniqueness of the Institute’s approach to the study of language and communication resides in addressing these fundamental topics at multiple levels, from molecules and cells, to circuits and brains, all the way through to the behavior of individuals and populations. Central to this research is language in all its varieties, diversity, and modalities.
The Institute currently has five Directors, each with their own field of expertise and research areas: Prof. Peter Hagoort, Neurobiology of Language (since 2006), Prof. Antje Meyer, Psychology of Language (since 2009), Prof. Simon Fisher, Language and Genetics (since 2010), Prof. Caroline Rowland, Language Development (since 2016), and Prof. Asli Ӧzyürek, Multimodal Language (since 2022). In addition, individual Research Groups usually under the aegis of one of the Departments focus on certain subareas of expertise, e.g. “Comparative bioacoustics”, “Communication in social interaction”, and others. For further information, see the Institute’s website: https://www.mpi.nl/
The Max Planck Institute at Nijmegen also hosts a major language archive. ‘The Language Archive’ was first established in the early 1990s to store language corpora collected by MPI researchers of the former ‘Language and cognition’ department during field trips. Moreover several collections of sign languages as well as other language corpora can be found.
Since 2000, it has been the central archive for the DOBES language documentation program. The DOBES (Dokumentation bedrohter Sprachen) program was initiated and funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung to document languages that are in danger of extinction within the foreseeable future. Its aims to include maintenance and revitalization of these languages and the preservation of linguistic data and information for future generations of speakers, researchers, and the general public.
Carried out in close co-operation with the community of its speakers, the documentation includes audio and video recordings – usually with transcription, gloss, and translation – pictographic and music documentation, and linguistic description, e.g. the language’s genetic affiliation, its grammar and phonology, socio-linguistic information, and information about the circumstances of the related recording. Over 64 collections of the Language Archive with materials from 102 different languages from around the globe have been added to UNESCO’s World Documentary Heritage.
In addition, MPI hosts the “Psycholinguistics Archive”, featuring depositories of research data from the various departments, e.g. neurobiological studies, genetics, behavioral studies and studies on how (a) language is acquired. For more information and access, see https://archive.mpi.nl/.
Profile Brigitte L.M. Bauer, Representative for MPI at CIPL
After her training as a linguist in Europe and several prestigious fellowships, Brigitte L.M. Bauer left the EU for a professorship at the University of Texas at Austin in 1999. Focusing on research over the past several years, she has also been a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen since 2016.
Bauer is an expert in comparative linguistics, with special focus on major grammatical changes and language evolution and possible correlates with language acquisition. She has published extensively on topics such as word order, impersonal verbs, possessive constructions, compounds, language shift, noun classification, and counting systems. Bauer has authored several books, on word order change in Indo-European, the spread of transitivity, and nominal apposition in syntax and word formation. She is currently working on her fifth book, investigating the emergence of morphological structures.
With her expertise in the multidisciplinary field of comparative linguistics (and degrees in more than one discipline) Bauer’s years at MPI have fostered her interest and insight in the relation between linguistics and other academic disciplines and the role of linguistics in multidisciplinary research.
