Spraclinge language: New lecture series starts at the University of Münster!

Spraclinge language: New lecture series starts at the University of Münster!

On October 11, 2025, the University of Münster will open a linguistic lecture series led by Prof. Dr. Christina Clasmeier. The event is organized by several philological institutes at the university and deals with central topics in psycholinguistics, a branch of linguistics that studies human language ability. University of Münster reports that...

The lecture series, which takes place on Tuesdays at 6:15 p.m. in room AE 11 at Aegidiistrasse 5, will include contributions from scholars from the fields of English, German, Dutch and Slavic studies. In order to promote comprehensibility for all participants, translations of the language examples are provided.

Content of the lecture series

The opening lecture on October 14th will be given by Prof. Dr. Christina Clasmeier held and illuminated the research landscape of psycholinguistics. The topics of the lecture range from multilingualism to the influence of language on memory. Particularly noteworthy is the lecture on December 9th, which deals with the processing of sentences in English, German and Dutch, under the title “neurotypological sandwich”.

Psycholinguistics covers a variety of aspects, including language acquisition, the conditions for producing and understanding language, and mental representation in the brain. It is closely linked to other disciplines such as language psychology, neurolinguistics and cognitive science. Wikipedia explains that...

Research fields and methods

Psycholinguistics traditionally deals with three main areas of research: language acquisition research, in which linguistic knowledge is analyzed in children and in second language acquisition; linguistic knowledge research, which considers the knowledge that a competent speaker must have about meanings and structures; as well as language process research, which deals with the application of this knowledge in language production and understanding.

A central concern of psycholinguistics is to clarify psychological mechanisms of language processing and to use systematically collected linguistic data, such as children's language data and errors in language production. Psycholinguistic hypotheses are often closely linked to neuroscientific findings, which underlines the interdisciplinarity of this research field. Additional information can be found on Wikipedia, which...

Research also considers the principle of compositionality, which states that the meaning of complex linguistic structures results from the meaning and arrangement of their parts. It is also being investigated whether processing steps in the brain are separated from one another or not.

The results of this research have implications not only for theoretical linguistics, but also for related areas such as clinical linguistics, speech science and language development, and they contribute to the understanding of the linguistic skills that are central to cognitive abilities such as thinking and memory. Psycholinguistic research is therefore diverse and relevant to many areas of life.

Further information and dates for the lecture series are available on the University of Münster website.