Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Germany  What happens in the brain when we hear a sentence or form one? Why is it that children and adults can all learn languages, but children are usually far more successful at it – or is that a false impression? Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Dutch city of Nijmegen are getting to the bottom of questions like these in the course of their project work. They are also interested in how language and thinking affect one another and what role the cultural environment plays in this. The four areas of language production, language comprehension, language acquisition, and language and cognition define the Institute’s scientific framework. These four areas are heavily interconnected through a flexible project structure, in line with the interdisciplinary nature of this research field.

The MIT Language Acquisition Lab          The ability to speak and understand a language is a distinctly human trait that is foundational to much of our individual, social, and cultural achievements. Typically, children acquire their language or languages within the first 5-6 years of life. How they accomplish this remarkable feat in such a short amount of time is the central topic of the study of child language acquisition.