9 April 2019, Crossing the boundaries: Language in Interaction, Nijmegen, the Netherlands

Broca and Wernicke’s breakthroughs in the 19th century paved the way to the current knowledge of language in the human brain. Yet, current research on this topic has gone above and beyond the scope of neuropsychology, with contributions from neuroscience, computer modelling, linguistics and genetics. The knowledge from these disciplines helped paint a more comprehensive picture of how the language system is organized in the brain. However, there is a theoretical gap between all these findings: solid evidence exists for how discrete elements of the language system are organized and work, but comprehensive models that encompass these separate results are still lacking. This reductionist bias is further exacerbated when overlooking the communicative aspect of language: are we able to fully explain how two human beings are able to communicate in an effective way?

In this symposium experts from different disciplines will explore how their fields of expertise can come together to provide an integrated understanding of human language.