Cognitive Science and Language- what do we research?

RESEARCH LINE: PROCESSING, REPRESENTATION AND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Psycholinguistics Research Group (PRG) http://psico.fcep.urv.cat/projectes/gip/esp/

Psycholinguistics is a discipline interested in the study of language acquisition and in the characterization of the cognitive mechanisms that intervene in the processing of linguistic information. Within this general framework, researchers from the URV's Psycholinguistics Research Group have diverse interests. One of the lines of research focuses on the study of the effects of the characteristics of words in their organization in memory and in their processing, with a special interest in the emotional content of words, their degree of concreteness, and their semantic ambiguity. Another line focuses on studying these same aspects in bilingual speakers, and on characterizing the existing differences between the processing of the different languages in bilinguals. In addition to studies with isolated words, the group's researchers are also interested in examining how people construct and process the syntactic structure of sentences, and how dependency relationships are established between different elements of a sentence. Other topics of interest are the acquisition of new concepts, the distributional models of language, the relationship between language and thought or the processing of figurative language. To carry out their research, the members of the group design experiments in which the speakers must perform different linguistic tasks and in which both behavioral measures (reaction time and error rate) and electrophysiological measures (event related potentials, ERPs) as well as eye movements are recorded. PRG researchers also have extensive experience in the development of word databases, where words are characterized in psycholinguistic and emotional variables. They also conduct large-scale studies that allow the collection of data from a large number of speakers and to examine the effect of the variables of interest on the general population.

LINE OF RESEARCH: THEORETICAL AND APPLIED LINGUISTICS

This broad research line brings together three research groups with different models of analysis and methodologies that converge on the same interest for the study of human language. GRLMC-- https://www.urv.cat/html/grupsrecerca/reconeguts/general-G687.php ROLLING-- https://www.urv.cat/html/grupsrecerca/reconeguts/general-G810.php

GRLMC-Research Group in Mathematical Linguistics develops interdisciplinary research in Linguistics. The main objective of the group is to adopt new formal/computational methods in the study of language. The GRLMC uses mathematical tools for the description and explanation of different aspects of natural languages (phonetics, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics ...). Natural language complexity, constraint-based formalisms, fuzzy models and the concept of grammaticality are some of GRLMC main lines of research.

ROLLING-Research on Language and Linguistics is a heterogeneous group that aims to conduct research on language and linguistics from a formal and theoretical point of view, as well as from an applied and experimental perspective. Their main research lines are a contrastive approach to argument structure and the morphology-syntax-lexicon-semantics interface; and linguistic variation and language acquisition in monolingual, bilingual and bidialectal speakers on the basis of acceptability judgments and other elicitation techniques. They also carry out research in sociolinguistics, phraseology, neology and language teaching.

GRELINAP-Research Group in Applied Linguistics aims to study the lexicon as a specific component of natural languages, both from a theoretical perspective -looking for detailed and precise descriptions of semantic, syntactic and morphological aspects-, as well as from an applied perspective: the acquisition of the lexicon of first and second languages in formal and informal contexts and the creation of lexical corpora and their didactic and lexicographic applications in multilingual contexts.