Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
Institute headquarters at Nijmegen, the Netherlands
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| Formation | 1980 |
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| Type | Scientific institute |
| Purpose | Research in psycholinguistics |
| Headquarters | Nijmegen, Gelderland, the Netherlands |
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Parent organization
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Max Planck Society |
| Website |
(in English) (in German) (in Dutch) |
The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (German: Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik; Dutch: Max Planck Instituut voor Psycholinguïstiek) is a research institute situated on the campus of Radboud University Nijmegen located in Nijmegen, Gelderland, the Netherlands. Founded in 1980, it is the only institution in the world entirely dedicated to psycholinguistics, and is also one of only three among a total of 90 within the Max Planck Society to be located outside Germany. The Nijmegen-based institute currently occupies 5th position in the Ranking Web of World Research Centers among all Max Planck institutes (7th by size, 4th by visibility). It currently employs about 135 people.
The institute specializes in language comprehension, language production, language acquisition, language and genetics, and the relation between language and cognition. Its mission is to undertake basic research into the psychological,social and biological foundations of language. The goal is to understand how human minds and brains process language, how language interacts with other aspects of mind, and how to learn languages of quite different types. The MPI for Psycholinguistics is a globally recognized center of linguistics and presents with its international archive of endangered languages a significant contribution to the preservation of the common heritage of mankind. This archive is sponsored since 2000 by the Volkswagen Foundation and offers on the internet about 50 projects.
The MPI for Psycholinguistics has six primary organizational units:
The Language and Cognition Department, headed by Stephen C. Levinson, investigates the relationship between language, culture and general cognition, making use of the "natural laboratory" of language variation. In this way, the department brings the perspective of language diversity to bear on a range of central problems in the language sciences. It maintains over a dozen field sites around the world, where languages are described (often for the first time), field experiments conducted and extended corpora of natural language usage collected. In addition, the department is characterized by a diversity of methods, ranging from linguistic analysis and ethnography to developmental perspectives, from psycholinguistic experimentation to conversation analysis, from corpus statistics to brain imaging, and from phylogenetics to linguistic data mining.
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