Language and perception are two basic cognitive systems which constantly interact and rely on each other in our daily existence.

LanPercept studies how people at different ages and with different deficits map language to what they perceive. The network of senior specialists and young professionals work together to develop new tools and software to help educational and health practitioners in their work.

About LanPercept

The network provided a unique approach to understanding the interaction between two central cognitive systems: language and perception. Traditionally these systems have been studied independently, with training provided from a single discipline perspective.

This training network offered an interdisciplinary approach to the examination of the bidirectional relationships between language and perception for the first time, bridging the translational gap between basic and applied research, both in clinical settings and in industry.

The workpackages in the training program form three interconnected clusters:

1. Language-perception interactions in healthy participants - basic research investigates theories of language and perception from complementary perspectives in order to break new ground in understanding language-perception interactions.
2. Language-perception interactions in atypical populations – applied research transports state-of-the-art methods of language-perception to atypical populations in order to identify underlying mechanisms for different kinds of atypical behaviours.
3. Advanced technologies for language and perception research bridges basic research and its applications in the development of new behavioural and neurophysiological techniques to identify the interaction between language and perception among typical (adults and children) and atypical populations.

Industrial partners within the Initial Training Network (ITN) worked across all three clusters, offering project-specific collaboration with ER and ERS trainees, secondment placements, entrepreneurial training at schools and courses, as well as supervision and industrial guidance through supervisory board and educational committee participation.

This ITN produced a new generation of integrative language and perception scientists with the technological, theoretical, and entrepreneurial skills necessary to make breakthroughs in the understanding of language-perception interactions and associated applications.

Language and Perception International Conference

13th-16th of June 2016, NTNU, Trondheim, Norway.

3rd Training Course

 Entrepreneurial Skills, 28th & 29th of April 2016 at Bielefeld University, Germany.

Article on our research on autism

published on NRK.

Article on Sobh Chahboun's LanPercept project

was published in Gemini under the title 'Language and perception in children with autism'.

Dorota Smith wins 1st price

for the best Research Poster of the Basic and Allied Neuroscience Research Group at the LHS Postgraduate Research Day.

Article on LanPercept projects in the newspaper

An article on the LanPercept projects "The processing of figurative (indirect) language and pragmatic inferencing from visual context in typical and atypical language" and "Situation models and comprehension in Autism Spectrum Disorders" was published in the Spanish newspaper ABC Sevilla with the title "Un proyecto europeo propone terapias para niños con dificultad en el lenguaje".

Prof. Mila Vulchanova speaks at The Future of the Doctorate EU Conference

Prof. Mila Vulchanova speaks about LanPercept and experiences from EU PhD training
at The Future of the Doctorate EU Conference, Riga - May 28-29, 2015

Important recognition of LanPercept fellow

Harm Brouwer has been awarded the 2015 Robert J. Glushko Prize for outstanding dissertations in cognitive science. Dr. Brouwer received his PhD from the University of Groningen in 2014, for his dissertation entitled "The Electrophysiology of Language Comprehension: A Neurocomputational Model", before joining Matthew Crocker's group at Saarland University, as a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow last July. As one of only four dissertations to be honoured by the prize in 2015, Harm has been invited to present his thesis to this year's meeting of the Cognitive Science Society in Pasadena, California, where he will also receive the $10,000 award. Congratulations Harm!!

LanPercept story on Horizon 2020 website:

April 22, 2015: Read story on the LanPercept project on the Horizon 2020 website: Finding the link between language and perception