NWO PhDs in the Humanities: PhD position for Bobby Ruijgrok

19 August 2013

LUCL is pleased to announce that Bobby Ruijgrok has been awarded a PhD-position within the NWO PhDs in the Humanities Programme. His project is entitled 'Tapping into semantic recovery: an event-related potential study on the processing of gapping'. LUCL congratulates Bobby on this beautiful result.

Summary of the project

This project aims to investigate the underlying (neurocognitive) linguistic processes of ellipsis resolution, particularly gapping. The proposed research will make use of the neuroscientific technique 'event-related brain potentials' (ERPs) to determine the time-course of ellipsis resolution. Ellipsis is a widespread phenomenon persistent in many of the world's languages and an adequate tool to examine non-lexical processing of meaning: interpretation of elided constituents requires a process of semantic recovery of a proposition. The question is what neural correlates underlie this process. In order to find out their effect on the resolution process, two dimensions, namely syntax and semantics, will be taken as variables in four experiments. Dutch sentences in which syntactic complexity or semantic complexity are manipulated will be explored. To control for prosody effects we will conduct the experiments in both the visual and auditory domain. Embedded in two research institutes at Leiden University, namely the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) and the Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition (LIBC) the project will be provided with theoretical expertise, neuroimaging and ERP facilities as well as the methodological and practical support. Potentially, the results of the project may shed light on theoretical debates as to how to account for ellipsis resolution, but also, it will provide empirical evidence for different cognitive mechanisms that underlie ellipsis processing, which is a central aspect of human cognition.