(New) Marieke Schouwstra wins an NWO Open Competition L

The ILLC's Marieke Schouwstra and Eva van Lier (UvA/ACLC) have won the NWO Open Competition for their project You won the lottery… NOT! Evolution, comprehension and structure of languages with late negation. Read the abstract below.

'Every human language employs a "negator" to express that something is not the case. Most languages place this negator before the verb; placing it afterward is relatively rare. Linguists theorize that negator-after-verb  is uncommon because it forces the brain to reinterpret a sentence’s meaning upon hearing the negator, though scientific proof for this claim is lacking. This project investigates late-negation languages using various methods, such as brain scanning of speakers of Cha’palaa, a late-negation language of Ecuador, and studying artificial language learning. By analyzing how humans process late negation, researchers aim to determine how cognition shapes language structure.'