Leiden University: Two Researchers Awarded Rubicon Grant for Overseas Research
Uncovering ageing processes in the brain and research on the use of the word ‘that’. Thanks to a Rubicon Grant, two Leiden researchers who were recently awarded their PhDs will be able to conduct research at a research institute abroad.
Ageing processes in the brain
Neurolinguist Fatemeh Tabassi Mofrad will do two years of brain research at Oxford University. The risk of age-related cognitive decline has increased, while the associated brain behaviour and the underlying genetic factors are not fully understood. Tabassi Mofrad will uncover brain connectivity patterns and gene variations that bring about cognitive decline to pave the way to novel interventions to prevent dementia.
This or that
Linguist Camil Staps will conduct two years of research at Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft in Germany. The word ‘that’ is often used to point to an object far from the speaker: ‘that book’. However, ‘this’ and ‘that’ can also be used in other contexts, e.g. ‘I know that it is raining’. Staps will investigate the surprisingly varied interpretations of demonstratives via large corpora and reading experiments.