As of the 1st of January 2021, Lisa Cheng, Professor of General Linguistics, will be the next Scientific Director of the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL). She tells us about LUCL and shares some of her thoughts about her upcoming role.

It’s not a regular occurrence at Leiden University: two professors giving their inaugural lecture on the same day. Berna Güroğlu and Ellen de Bruijn specialise in related disciplines: they both research the influence of social context on processes in the brain – Güroğlu in adolescents and De Bruijn…

Assessing Learning in Higher Education addresses what is probably the most time-consuming part of the work of staff in higher education, and something to the complexity of which many of the recent developments in higher education have added. Getting assessment ‘right’– that is, designing and implementing…

James Shires has contributed a chapter to the proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Cyber Conflict (CyCon 2021), which gathers 20 articles from the law, technology and strategy domains.

This book is the first comparative study of estimative intelligence and strategic surprise in a European context, complementing and testing insights from previous studies centred on the United States. It does extensive empirical analysis of open-source material and interviews in relation to three cases…

The Intelligence and Security research group focuses on intelligence and security within the European Union. Its approach is interdisciplinary and reflects ISGA’s broad perspective, combining insights from ethics, history, law, political science, psychology, and sociology.

Van Vark defended her dissertation 'Separation and immersion: the changing role of the armed forces in Northwestern liberal democracies’ on 17 October 2025. The doctoral research was supervised by Maartje van der Woude and Erwin Muller.

Empathic or anxious mistakes? A neurocognitive investigation of the development of social performance monitoring in youth growing up in stressful versus non-stressful environments

The Business, Technology & Public Policy research group of the Department of Business Sciences at Leiden University focuses on investigating the dynamic interaction between 'new' technologies and various stakeholders, including consumers, employees, and businesses. Our research delves into perceptions,…

PhD defence

On the 12th of December, Ria Huijgen-Koolen successfully defended a doctoral thesis. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Ria on this achievement!

Conference, Meet us in your country

Tahir Abbas, associate professor at ISGA, has been appointed as a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. The Academy of Social Sciences is the UK’s national academy of academics, learned societies and practitioners in the social sciences. Its purpose is to promote social science in the United Kingdom…

Leiden University offers ambitious students the latest knowledge and the freedom to develop their own area of expertise.

Psycholinguistic research

Research framework CIAS

Once you have obtained your bachelor’s degree, you will be ready for a next step: continuing your studies or entering the job market. Completing the Linguistics bachelor’s programme will give you an excellent preparation for both options.

Using brain imaging to discover the area in the brain that recognizes emotion.

This PhD project investigates how automatic sign language recognition technology can be further developed to analyse static images and textual descriptions of signs.

Language can be a time machine: we can learn from ancient texts how our ancestors interacted with the world around them. But can language also teach us something about people whose language has been lost? PhD candidate Anthony Jakob investigated whether the languages of prehistoric populations left…

About 90 per cent of Austronesian and Papuan languages are under threat of soon becoming extinct. Marian Klamer is the only professor in the world who researches both these language groups. She records languages before they disappear and sheds new light on the history of Indonesia. Inaugural lecture…

The LUCL Labs consist of four spaces equipped to conduct high-quality experimental linguistic research.

The pre-master's is a bridging programme for students who have applied for the MA Linguistics, but who, according to the Board of Admissions, still have deficiencies in their educational background. Once you have completed the pre-master’s programme, you will be admitted to the relevant specialization…

On the 26th of February, Joane de Lima Santiago successfully defended her doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Joane on this achievement.

You can ask virtual assistant Siri about the weather, but you can’t have a real conversation with it yet. You can’t refer to anything that’s been said before, or ask the system why it says what it says. Stephan Raaijmakers, Professor by Special Appointment from TNO, hopes to change this.

PhD defence

On 11 March, Oliver Rathkolb (University of Vienna) held a lecture about Social Democracy.

Lecture

Half the world's population is introverted and comes home drained after an evening of drinks. Their social battery is empty. 'People with autism have a similar experience, but much more intense,' says Boya Li, who researches emotional regulation in children with autism and hearing impairment. Does this…

This year’s Staatsrechtconferentie (Constitutional Law Conference) was held at the University of Amsterdam on 13 December 2019 and dedicated to the topic of the Economic Constitution. Dr. Eduardo Arenas Catalán, lecturer at the Europa Institute, presented his paper Where do social rights begin? Dr.…

Adva Eichengreen starts a fellowship focusing on enhancing social participation of deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children. Eichengreen has been offered a postdoc position at Leiden University as part of the Marie-Sklodowska-Curie “LEaDing Fellows” Project within the collaboration of the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus…

At the beginning of July, a committee appointed by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) presented its report 'Social Safety in Dutch Academia. From Paper to Practice', to the Dutch Minister of Education, Culture and Science. The committee was chaired by Professor Naomi Ellemers…

On the 28th of September, Jiang Wu successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Jiang on this achievement!

On July 5th, Mulugeta Tarekegne Tsegaye succesfully defended his doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Mulugeta on this great result.

This book investigates the effects of brain lesions in the left hemisphere, specifically Broca's area, on the production and perception of vowels, of word tones and of the linguistic use of sentence melody.

On the 4th of June, Menghui Shi successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Menghui Shi on this achievement!

This project examines the notion of sacred fertility and sacred landscapes, associated rituals and material culture, both archaeological and ethnographic manifestations in the Horn of Africa.

This thesis presents a detailed description of the phonology, the tone system and the grammar of Liko, a Bantu language spoken by about 70,000 people in the northeastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It provides numerous examples.

On the 5th of November, Timothy Gaved successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Timothy on this achievement!

On May 2nd, Petr Kocharov succesfully defended his doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Petr on this great result.

If you want to follow a full academic programme, the next step after obtaining your bachelor’s is a master’s degree (MA) at a Dutch or international university. And there may be no better place for your further master’s study than Leiden University!

Argumentation and rhetorics is the study of how we convince people verbally. In other words, what do people say and how do they say it?

On the 1st of November, Andrew Wigman successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Andrew on this achievement!

On February 28th, Promise Dodzi Kpoglu succesfully defended his doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Dodzi on this great result.

On February 7th, Lotte Dros-Hendriks succesfully defended her doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Lotte on this great result.

On the 17th of January, Sarah Von Grebmer Zu Wolfsthurn successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Sarah on this achievement!

Emphasizing on the key role of polysemy in forming the lexicon is the main goal to be achieved in this dissertation paper. The paper suggests a qualitative evaluation of polysemy in comparing it with other relations that form the lexicon. The research confirms that the polysemic links must not be modeled…

How do social and political developments influence the process of meaning-making in different parts of the world? Why is a particular discourse interpreted in numerous ways depending on the context it is produced and propagated? And how are culture, politics, history, and language intertwined?