Ongoing language projects within the LOT institutes

The aim of the project is to achieve a better representation of hard-to-reach subgroups in terms of selective response and measurement bias. An experiment will be conducted in which respondents are approached either face-to-face or by phone and can choose to be interviewed face-to-face, by phone or online. To assess the effects of absence of interviewers in web-surveys, a traditional textbased web-survey will be compared with a video-enhanced web-survey, using pre-recorded video clips of interviewers reading survey questions. Earlier research showed that a video-enhanced mode is more likely to increase reports of sensitive information as compared to traditional textbased surveys.

Naming of children is an act by which parents can show social class membership, especially after the custom of naming after kinship has been largely abandoned in the first name. The dynamics of naming (ascend and descend in popularity of names and development in their spatial spread) demonstrates internal dynamics in groups of names that relates to social class behavior.

This project aims at investigating the syntactic role of focus in ellipsis across languages.

The ultimate aim of the project is to find out whether there are such things as "analytic languages" and, if so, whether the nature of such languages has anything to do with the nature of the functional categories they realize or with the way they realize them.

Crowdsourcing project to make available for the public 10.000 scans of the so-called Sailing Letters: letters on ships that were captured by the English in the Dutch-Anglo wars in the 17th and 18th centuries. To the scans are added metadata and transcriptions by volunteers.

Theories of first language acquisition are increasingly considering the role of aspects of cognition, specifically executive functioning. The goal of this group is to examine this relationship in children of different types. Formal models of executive functioning will be developed.

The aim of the project is to add the corresponding sound fragments to the phonetic transcriptions by means of the program PRAAT.