The goal of my research is to understand the enlanguaged mind. Human beings are social creatures that use diverse languages to communicate their thoughts, perceptions, and feelings. Therefore, elucidating the role of language in cognition is critical to understanding how the human mind works. My research programme specifically targets events. Events are central units in human perception, memory, and reasoning. Likewise, our use of language is centred on events ("last Friday, my sons went to the zoo with grandma", "today, we are having pasta for dinner"). Using EEG and eye-tracking methods, my group studies the processing of visually depicted events (real-world photographs, video clips) cross-linguistically (in, for example, Dutch, English, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Estonian). We investigate under which conditions linguistic influences on cognition arise, and at which level of cognitive processing we find them.
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