Lecture (LEC)

Topic: Mental lexicon & the brain

Seminar participants are invited to pursue and advance their own research projects/dissertation goals as they develop an understanding of ongoing debates in neurocognitive research and share with the rest of the class the most recent research/debate in their areas of interest. The seminar will explore recent neurocognitive research addressing the encoding of basic lexico-grammatical representations, the recursive computation of grammatical elements into basic objects and building of structures, and their externalization into speech, with a focus on similarities and differences between the dynamics of neurofunctional systems for first (L1) or second (L2) languages in bilinguals. We will explore the degree to which fundamental aspects of L2 development (L1 transfer and general constraints in language development) can be explained terms of a preexisting language network for the L1, the development of feature-specific neuronal ensembles and circuits, and hypotheses about network dynamics. Graduate students from various backgrounds are welcome to engage with the general seminar topic and to share recent advances in their preferred research area.