Hi everyone,
My name is Iske, I'm in the Cognitive Science track. When convenient (i.e. as an excuse for not understanding all that difficult neuroscience), I say I'm a linguist. I have a bachelor's degree in Linguistics and am also doing a research master in that field. Actually, I'm taking a class on Generative Grammar right now! However, my fellow linguists think I'm different too, because I believe language only exists in individual brains, and linguistics is fundamentally a cognitive science. This inability to fit in is obviously what made me such a PSYCHO linguist.
Recently however, I found a place full of people like me: the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. My ambition is to do a PhD there, and as a preparation for that I hope to find a second research project there as well. It will most likely have something to do with syntactic processing: the building of sentences in the brain and the representation of syntactic knowledge. I hope to learn about EEG and look at the time-course of linguistic processes with the use of ERPs.
Another topic I'm interested in is the relation between language and thought. I think there is a lot of interesting research being done in the tradition of the linguistic relativity hypothesis (often associated with Sapir and Whorf). This idea has recently been sort of 'redefined' and is now studied in a much more sophisticated way than before by people like Stephen Levinson, John Lucy and Lera Boroditsky.
At the moment I'm doing my first internship, which is about linguistic representations of agreement morphology and definiteness in bilingual children and children with specific language impairment. I use a perception task (self paced listening) to investigate possible causes of these kids' deficits in language production. I'm completing the piloting stage now and hope to start testing actual, live children in a couple of weeks... A bit scary, but exciting!
I also like to organise science-related (or: geeky) fun, mostly as a board member of Cognito. On the agenda are the lecture series Café Cognitive (first edition october 15!), the Halloween party and Cinema Cognitive (a brain and cognitive science movie night). Outside of Cognito, I'm currently planning a full-day EEG workshop in the second semester.
Now, to the next speaker!
Best,
Iske