Festival

Vocal learning is a trait shared by songbirds and humans. It is also a trait that is restricted by the brain rather than by a species' vocal apparatus. In this dissertation, functional MRI is employed in both species in order to explore potential common neural mechanisms underlying the ability to develop…

Festival

It is one of the most talked-about subjects right now: how do we eradicate sexual harassment and violence? Alumnus Femke Eisma is the spokesperson for Mariëtte Hamer, the government commissioner tasked with tackling this persistent social problem. Eisma studied the Dutch language at Leiden. How is her…

Researcher Max van Duijn and PhD student Bram van Dijk apply language models to stories told by children to investigate empathy. For this research, they received the Best Paper Award at the Computational Natural Language Learning Conference in Singapore.

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This dissertation provides a systematic description of English and Afrikaans verbal pseudo-coordination and a formal analysis couched in the Minimalist program.

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LUCL is pleased to announce that two Vrije Competitie Grants have been awarded to LUCL researchers. Prof.dr. Lisa Cheng and dr. Jenny Doetjes have been awarded a grant for their project 'Understanding questions'. Prof.dr. Michael Kemper (UvA) and prof.dr. Jos Schaeken have been awarded a grant for the…

For people who are seriously ill, an empathetic doctor can make a world of difference. Psychologist Janine Westendorp examined helpful and harmful communication in the consulting room. ‘It’s very important to stress that you are always there supporting the person, even if there’s no cure.’

On 22 November, Leiden scientist Jan Vonk received an ERC starting grant for his research on the building blocks of mathematics. This grant is not his first this year: in fact, this July Vonk also received a Vidi from NWO. Four questions to the scientist who got two grants this year.

'Psychologists think I’m a linguist but linguists think I’m a psychologist,' says cognitive neuroscientist Xiaochen Zheng. With the Veni grant she will be able to bring these two fields of research closer together. Read her answers to five questions.

What motivates learners in bilingual education to learn English and how can and do teaching practices contribute to that motivation?

This project focuses on a striking parallelism between two macro-groups of languages: southern Italian dialects and the so-called split-ergative languages, like Basque, Georgian, Dyirbal, Hindi/Urdu.

This thesis investigates the application of deep learning techniques in image analysis across various domains, focusing on four main themes: feature extraction, classification, segmentation, and integration, demonstrating the transformative potential of these technologies.

Brain scanners have radically changed neurolinguistics. They are increasing our understanding of how the brain processes language. Professor Niels Schiller has produced a standard work on this.

Women Writing Mexico (WWM) is a network of women and men concerned with the human rights crisis in Mexico and more specifically, with the impact of structural forms of poverty, everyday violence, and discrimination based on gender, race, social class, and ethnicity, that particularly have an impact…

Nadine Akkerman's book Invisible Agents is the very first study to analyse the role of early modern women spies. The book foregrounds the agency of early-modern women, offering a corrective to the gender bias implicit in modern historiography.

Endangered languages can survive if they are taught properly to new speakers, such as people with a migrant background. This is what Professor by Special Appointment Felix Ameka will say in his inaugural lecture on 30 September. Dutch people can do their bit by being less ‘polite’ to people whose mother…

What started as a call for help in a Facebook group turned into a permanent group of students from the Bachelor's in Russian Studies and the Master's in Russian and Eurasian Studies who regularly help the Ukrainian refugees. They act as the link between the refugees and aid workers at various reception…

This dissertation examines whether a cochlear implant provides congenitally deaf born children with sufficient auditory input to acquire low salient and syntactically and semantically complex functional items such as personal pronouns compared to their hearing peers.

All languages use melody in speech, primarily via rises and falls of the pitch of voice. Such pitch variation is pervasive, offering a wide spectrum of nuance to sentences – an additional layer of meaning. For example, saying “yes” with a rising pitch implies a question (rather than an affirmation).…

This thesis discusses the development in Proto–Indo–European, Latin and Romance of a word–formation pattern which the most adequate terminology in use dubs ‘verbal government compounds with a governing first member’; I use the shorthand ‘pickpocket compounds’.

Lecture, Herta Mohr Lecture

Academic studies or an academic career are a big challenge if you are deaf. Particularly in Africa, where many countries don’t even have secondary schools for the deaf. A team of Leiden academics has organised the first summer school for and by deaf academics on the African continent, in Ghana. We spoke…

Lecture

Over 30.000 pages of new material have been added to the online collection of unofficial poetry publications from China in the Leiden Digital Collections. Produced outside the system, these journals and books are hugely influential yet very hard to find. To address this paradox, Leiden University Libraries…

Purple clothing and a pride flag flying from all University buildings: Leiden University is once again taking part in Purple Friday. How do people experience this day? We asked some employees and students of the Faculty of Humanities.

Lecture, Summer School evening lectures

Excessive regulatory burden causes economic harm and can undermine trust in government. Policymakers wishing to ease this should be more mindful of people’s differing responses to rules, says PhD candidate Ritsart Plantenga in his dissertation.

This project will study the cultural meaning of the mythological figure of Orestes within the ancient Greek imagination, as it emerges from various literary sources from the archaic and classical periods.

English Language and Culture lecturer Mili Gabrovšek has won the Education Award 2015. In the report, the jury praised Gabrovšek's humor and enthusiasm. Each year the award is presented to the most inspiring lecturer of the faculty at the opening of the academic year.

Lecture, LUCL Colloquium - Series '24/'25

Linguist Willem Adelaar was appointed to Knight in the Order of the Dutch Lion on October 1st. On that very same day he celebrated his 43-year connection to Leiden University. Adelaar has an impressive track record in the field of indigenous, and often endangered, Amerindian languages.

The largest international conference on English historical linguistics is coming to Leiden. From 7 June to 11 June 2021, the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) organises the International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL-21). Due to Covid measures, the conference takes…

Workshop

Thijs Porck, teacher at English Language and Culture, has won the faculty teaching prize. He was lauded for his enthousiasm, his creative ways of teaching, and his commitment to his students.

He started his career as a part-time PhD candidate and a reading volunteer at his children's school. Now, as a professor, he looks back on forty years of research and education: Peter Klinkhamer of the Institute of Biology Leiden, ecologist in heart and soul.

The occupation of the Afghan capital Kabul by the radical Taliban movement on 15 August 2021 received enormous international attention, not least because of the crisis that soon enveloped Kabul airport as desperate Afghans sought to flee the country on evacuation flights mounted by the United States…