The role of religion in the identity construction of LGBTQIA+ folks

Using brain imaging to discover the area in the brain that recognizes emotion.

Was Nabatean also a spoken language? And if so, for how long? These are just two questions that historical linguist Benjamin Suchard will address in his new research project. Suchard is one of three LUCL researchers to receive a coveted Veni grant of 250.000 euros from the Dutch Research Council (NW…

Leiden scholars succeeded in making Arabic accessible to Western academic communities as early as the sixteenth century. But how did they approach this problem?

The Disticha Catonis by Catenaccio of Anagni. A text in vernacular from Latium (late 13th - early 14th century)

This thesis seeks to examine the emergence of Persian novels and short stories during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988).

When we read a text, we think we know who wrote it, but in the early modern period, manuscript production was often a collaborative or ‘socialised’ enterprise involving secretaries and scribes who physically wrote what the author dictated.

This book presents the first comprehensive description of Tafi, one of the fourteen Ghana-Togo Mountain (GTM) languages, spoken by approximately 4,400 people in the southeastern part of Ghana. The description consists of thirteen chapters and is based on a corpus gathered during two fieldwork periods…

Experimental research

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.’

Tailoring teaching to students’ learning needs in speaking skills in modern foreign languages is desirable, but difficult to achieve in regular classes in secondary schools. Esther de Vrind, PhD, manager and teacher educator at ICLON, developed a method to make this easier. Defence on 25 November.

When it comes to literature, people mostly talk about what characters see or hear. Rarely is it about what they smell. That’s a shame, thinks university lecturer Jan van Dijkhuizen. He has been awarded an Open Competition grant from NWO to expand academic knowledge about scent in literature, and to…

In this dissertation, electrophysiological (EEG) and behavioural measures are used to investigate how allophonic tonal variants and sub-phonemic features are processed during Mandarin and Dutch speech production, visual processing of written words and reading aloud.

Professor Felix Ameka and university lecturer Maria del Carmen Parafita Couta have received an NWO Open Competition grant together with Enoch Aboh (University of Amsterdam) to do research on ‘code-switching’: switching languages by multilinguals.

This project aims to open up the pre-Islamic linguistic history of Arabia through the systematic study of the Thamudic inscriptions within a digital humanities framework.

This book contains the first three Leiden-Aramco Lectures on Arabic Language and Culture delivered by Petra Sijpesteijn, James E. Montgomery and Geert Jan van Gelder.

This thesis investigates the connection between tonal realization and tone change (tone sandhi) in Wenzhou Chinese, and whether and how such a connection is conditioned by prosodic structure and focus marking.

-

In this dissertation, a comprehensive portrait of the American-born Quaker Lindley Murray (1745–1826) is painted and the influence of Murray’s Quakerism on his language use is investigated by analyzing a corpus of 262 of his unpublished private letters.

A collaboration between linguists, geographers and anthropologists aims to uncover how languages spread across South America over thousands of years. Associate Professor Rik van Gijn is responsible for the linguistic side of this NWO project.

This thesis aims at contributing to our understanding of the semantic and prosodic properties of object foci in Greek, employing theoretical and experimental tools.

-

Leids onderzoek naar bestraffing komt tot stand uit verschillende disciplines. Het onderzoeksproject kent een juridische, criminologische, sociaalwetenschappelijke en filosofische invalshoek.

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.

Prof. dr. Marcel Cobussen will take part in a research network project in London.

This project employs a systematic experimental approach to examine the interaction of these two hitherto independent lines of research (tone sandhi and focus realization) in six dialects of Chinese, which lie on a continuum between dialects with dense tonal distributions and sparser distributions. In…

What is the provenance of introduced populations?

Humanities are needed to make sense of social issues. Watch or listen to the stories of our experts who tell about their research and the impact on society. Get to know the world at Humanities!

Which immune mechanisms are involved in host defense against Staphylococcal infection?

The main goal of the LIACS Masters Programme Committee is to assess and provide oversight for the course evaluations from the students. Specifically, we discuss the student evaluations of the courses and decide on comments to be given to the program directors and teachers as well as followup plans.…

University lecturer Olga van Marion invited pupils from Ashram College in Alphen aan den Rijn to take part in a series of Dutch workshops organised at the University. Some the students and workshop leaders reflect on the busy morning.

Platform for research about heritage languages spoken in the Netherlands

In this dissertation a large corpus of letter signs and texts gathered during fieldwork in Niger, and to a lesser extent Mali and Burkina Faso is used to show the graphemic diversity of the traditional script of the Tuaregs, tifinagh, and to analyze the orthographic system.

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…

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…

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…

Festival

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.

-

Social scientists from Leiden University have worked with an international team to create teaching modules on migration.

-

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