Speaker:　Prof. Niels O. Schiller 
　　　　　 Professor of Psycho- and NeuroLinguistics
　　　　　 Leiden University Institute for Linguistics (LUCL)
　　　　　 Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition (LIBC)
　　　　　 Leiden University
Time:　　9:30-11:00am
Date:　　Jun 5th(wed), 2013
Venue: 　6th Floor Meeting Room, South Building IPCAS
Abstract: 
In this talk, I will first give an overview of the language production process and especially grammatical encoding. Then, I will present examples of behavioral and neuroimaging studies on the gender congruency effect in noun phrase production. I will provide experimental evidence from Germanic languages such as Dutch or German and demonstrate how theory-driven research in those languages has contributed to new insights regarding the discussion about the mechanisms and architecture in lexical access. Importantly, however, it is widely known that psycholinguistic theories are heavily based on data obtained from Germanic languages, above all English. Therefore, I will also provide new data from several Cushitic languages such as Konso, native to parts of Ethiopia. Cushitic noun morphology exhibits an interesting interaction between gender and number morphology. I will demonstrate the importance of field-based psycholinguistic data acquisition to inform theories of language processing.