Cas Coopmans awarded a NWO Rubicon grant

As humans we are extremely skilled at transforming spoken language into abstract linguistic units, like those comprising syntax. This is a remarkable ability because speech and syntax are very different types of signals. In his Rubicon project, Cas will focus on the role of prosody in this process. Prosody is interesting because it is both a property of speech and at the same it is closely related to syntactic structure. The relationship between syntax and prosody is known in linguistics, language development and psycholinguistics, but the insights of these three domains have not yet been combined into a coherent research program.

Using magnetoencephalography, a neuroimaging technique, Cas will investigate how the brain makes use of prosody to extract the structure of spoken sentences. His project thus takes a specific psycholinguistic angle to address a foundational question in cognitive science: how does the brain integrate sensory input with cognitive knowledge to form a coherent percept of incoming information?