Emmy Noether Group:

“Information structure and neurocognitive foundations: Inferences and word order variation” (2008-2016)

The Emmy Noether Research Group studies language comprehension in discourse from a neurocognitive and typological perspective. The individual team members investigate referential porcesses at the interface of syntax, semantics and information structure. We use electrophysiological measures (event related brain potentials, ERPs) to sketch the time course of interpretation in discourse. Our main languages of interest are German, Chinese, and Japanese. We also investigate comprehension in the context of language impairment. The project aims at developing a neurocognitive model of language processing in discourse and to identify and rank those factors that are relevant for reference resolution, both in the particular languages under investigation and also from a universal point of view.