Fall semester
Tue/Thu 12:00-14:00
Course 853755701

The course covers various aspects of the language network in the brain, its function in health and in disease, from multiple linguistic levels (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics). The first couple of classes are dedicated to acquiring basic knowledge of the brain’s structure and function, as well as getting familiar with common research methods in neuroscience. After that, the course will overview the mapping of linguistic abilities onto the brain, from early findings and conceptions (Broca’s and Wernicke’s region; Geschwind model) through more contemporary views and ongoing debates (a modular view vs. a multi-functional distributed view). Special focus will be given to the contribution of theoretical linguistics to the study of language processing in the brain and the linguistic insights that can be gained from neurobiological research.

Course taught in English.

Spring semester
Thu 08:00-12:00
Course 853755801

The course will expose the students to the various types of research in computational linguistics and basic concepts in natural language processing (NLP), which are the basis of many language-based technologies such as ChatGPT or Google Translate. The students will learn about syntactic parsing, word embeddings and the importance of next-word prediction for state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) such as BERT or GPT. The students will be able to appreciate the different tasks that can be achieved through large language models, such as text summarization, automatic translation, sentiment analysis and text generation. Special focus will be given to the ways by which computational tools can assist research in linguistics and in neurolinguistics. The course does not require any knowledge in coding and assumes no background in computer science or mathematics.

Course taught in English.

Spring semester
Tue 16:00-18:00
Course 8537915001/2

In this seminar, students will be familiarized with current research on brain processing of language, with focus on syntax and semantic word integration. There are various ways to model the cognitive cost of syntax in a word-by-word basis. The project of the course will be constructing a theoretical experiment, with clear hypotheses, to test a theory of syntactic processing in the brain. Throughout the semester, students will present papers from neuroscience and cognitive science on the neural correlates of online syntactic processing.

Seminar is given in English.