Key Profile Area Skills and Structures in Language and Cognition
Linguistic communication is the central form of human communication, which manifests itself in a wide variety of different forms, from everyday communication to political controversy in social media. In order to understand how language functions as a complex cognitive and social system in these different forms of communication, a multidisciplinary approach is required, for which the term Language Sciences has recently become established. The KPA “Skills and Structures in Language and Cognition” has set itself the task of establishing an innovative concept of Language Sciences at the University of Cologne, to which cognitive sciences, philosophy, media sciences and educational sciences will contribute alongside the various specializations of Cologne's linguistics.
Central to this new concept of Language Sciences is the hypothesis that direct dyadic communication is the central form of linguistic communication and that all other forms of linguistic communication can be systematized and further researched in comparison with this basic form of linguistic communication. Over the last two decades, considerable progress has been made in the study of direct dyadic communication, which needs to be further deepened and used for the analysis of other, e.g. digital and institutional, communication formats. Central themes here are multimodality, variability and portability of linguistic structures and communication formats.
Contacts
Prof. Dr. Birgit Hellwig
Spokesperson
Institut für Linguistik
Prof. Dr. Pamela Perniss
Spokesperson
Gebärdensprachlinguistik und -dolmetschen
Dr. Tobias-Alexander Herrmann
Administrative Coordinator
Slavisches Institut
Lena Wolberg
Administrative Coordinator
Institut für Linguistik
Participating faculties
Global Faculty Members
Scientists from various countries are currently participating in the Skills and Structures in Language and Cognition KPA as part of the Global Faculty Program.
Here you can find all members of the Global Faculty Program at the University of Cologne.
The Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory (University of South Australia)
Collaborative and third-party funded projects
The Skills and Structures in Language and Cognition KPA is linked to several collaborative and third-party funded projects:
Transfer
The KPA Skills and Structures in Language and Cognition coordinates a wide range of public outreach activities in the areas of research data management, automatic speech/sign recognition, teacher training and medicine.
Specific projects include transfer in teacher training in the areas of media and digitalization (e.g. the Media and Digitalization Research Group at IZeF), language development and language education for newly arrived immigrant pupils (e.g. the Immigrant Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Students as Additional Language Learners project led by the BMFTR [Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space]) and inclusion (e.g. sign language interpreting).
Transfer activities are also being developed in the field of medicine, particularly with regard to autism, schizophrenia and Parkinson's disease (e.g. the DFG transfer project 'Digital Biomarkers for Speech Changes in Parkinson's Disease').
Teaching
The institutions associated with the KPA Skills and Structures in Language and Cognition jointly offer a German and English-language Master's degree programme in Linguistics as well as research-oriented teaching initiatives. These include the XLinC Lab and Language and Music in Cognition.
Partnerships
The KPA Skills and Structures in Language and Cognition cooperation network includes both regional and international universities and AUFs.
Regional partnerships
- Grimme Institut – Gesellschaft für Medien, Bildung und Kultur
- Mercator Institute for Literacy and Language Education
- Forschungszentrum Jülich, Institute for Neurosciences and Medicine – Cognitive Neuroscience (INM-3)
International partnerships
- Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (Nijmegen, the Netherlands)
- The Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, University of South Australia (Adelaide, Australia)
- The Acquisition Sketch Project (Australian National University, Canberra, Australia - The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia - RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau, Germany)
Research infrastructures
The research of the KPA Skills and Structures in Language and Cognition is characterized by the integration of a primarily corpus-based, cross-linguistic approach with psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic approaches. We can draw on a large number of (audio-)visual and written corpora of natural language use as well as state-of-the-art experimental resources.
- Externally funded projects designed to build a dynamic repository and audio mining tools for multimodal speech data include: Audiovisual data mining (AUVIS, BMFTR)
- BMFTR (Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space) joint project KA³ - Cologne Center Analysis and Archiving of Audio-Visual Data
- Common Language Research Infrastructure-Germany - Specialist Working Group (CLARIN-D, BMFTR)
- VedaWeb (DFG)
Media
Members of the KPA Skills and Structures in Language and Cognition regularly place content on particular topics or appear in the media with their research:
Video
Birgit Hellwig: Language acquisition in crosslinguistic context (ILARA invited talk)
Video
Stephan Packard: Die Vereinigten Staaten nach den Mid-Term Elections – Demokratien und der Reiz des Autoritären (in German)