Phonological Networks in Language Production and Comprehension

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Friedemann Pulvermüller
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages ; Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 411066644

Current brain language theories primarily focus either on language production or on its perception and comprehension; multimodal theories that explain both are largely missing or are not worked out in sufficient detail. In a joint effort of French and German scientists specializing, respectively, in speech production and speech comprehension, this project will perform parallel production and comprehension experiments in French and German to improve our understanding of the brain mechanisms of language. To do so, a range of cutting-edge neuroscience techniques will be used (MEG, EEG, fMRI, DTI/DWI, TMS) to map the cortical areas and their activation time course in speech production and comprehension tasks along with their functional contributions to the processes required for these tasks. A main focus will be on the relative contributions of frontal and motor vs temporal and auditory cortices to phonological processing in speech production and comprehension. Therefore, minimal pairs, that is, meaningful word pairs only distinct in one language sound (e.g., “monkey” vs. “donkey”), will be studied in production and comprehension experiments to find out whether brain activations indexing the discrimination between speech sounds are constant across modalities and play a similar functional role in both kinds of tasks (perceptual and productive). Specific experiments will address important controversial issues currently disputed amongst scholars in the neuroscience of language, including the seriality vs. parallelism of phonological and semantic-pragmatic information access in both comprehension and production and, specifically, the question whether, although posterior temporal areas are relevant for both production and comprehension, the anterior language areas and particularly the motor system are critical only for production but not for perception and understanding of language. We expect that this project will significantly contribute to a better understanding of brain language relationships especially as our work, due to its systematic use of two major European languages, will present results that already have some cross linguistic validity, because they apply to both French and German, thus being less likely to be subject to confounds sometimes emerging in experimental linguistic research. Further crucial added value of the planned project comes from the principal investigators’ complementary expertises in language production and comprehension theory and experiment, along with their joint full coverage of all major neuroscience methods and their pre-existant synergistic collaboration.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Denmark, France, United Kingdom
• Partner Organisation: Agence Nationale de la Recherche / The French National Research Agency
• Cooperation Partners: Dr. Rachel Moseley; Professor Yury Shtyrov, Ph.D.; Dr. Kristof Strijkers
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Thomas Picht