What are the differences between all the languages in the world?
What is special about the way they pronounce the 'r' in the Dutch Gooi region, and who uses this pronunciation? How does a baby discover which sounds belong to its native language? How do children in a bilingual family keep the two languages apart? What happens in the human brain after a stroke, or in the brain of children with dyslexia? How can we improve schoolchildren's reading and writing skills? And what makes text or talk comprehensible, interesting, persuasive?
The answers to these and many similar questions are being explored by a large team of researchers in the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS (UiL OTS). The UiL OTS is the home of linguistic and communications research at Utrecht University.
Areas of expertise: mother tongue | bilingualism | language acquisition | language teaching | syntax | semantics | phonology | psycholinguistics | phonetics | pragmatics | discourse studies | sociolinguistics | neurolinguistics | grammar | dyslexia | aphasia | reading and writing skills | language corpus research