Neurolinguistic investigation of language processing

Conversation between humans is a highly multimodal process, based on analysis of several sensory information streams. During the understanding of contextual language in a given scenario, we also have to analyze and interpret expectations, situational references to actions, and to the immediately preceding auditory, visual, and non-verbal communicative signals. How are such processes realized in the brain? In which way does communication depend on such components? How does the robustness or the efficiency of communication between humans and robots rely on such multimodal integration? 

The aim of this project is to investigate the multimodal integration during language processing by means of electroencephalography (EEG). The time course of meaning constitution during scenario-embedded sentence comprehension can be investigated by analyzing the event-related potentials (ERP analysis). The electrophysiological dissociation of parallel processes within neural cell assemblies can be achieved by using spectral analytic methods such as EEG coherence and phase analysis.