Cognitive Science and Language

Introduction

Cognitive Science and Language is an inter-university, interdisciplinary postgraduate programme combining master's degree and doctoral levels that responds to the need to overcome the academic barriers between the different areas of cognitive science. The programme places a particular focus on speech perception and language acquisition, the syntactic and semantic processing involved in speech, the relationship between semantics and cognition, the logical structure of language and the epistemic and conceptual foundations of language study, computational analysis of language, and the relationship between the different areas of cognitive science.
This master's degree offers interdisciplinary education in three key areas of cognitive science: psychology, linguistics and philosophy. The course consists of a common module of basic subjects, a specialization module covering specific topics from each of the three key areas, and a module comprising optional subjects.
The goal of this degree is to give students the skills they will need to carry out a research project, which may be developed further under the doctoral programme and lead to the writing and defence of a doctoral thesis. The three areas of specialization in both the master's degree and the doctoral programme are overseen by the best lecturers and researchers at each of the participating universities, and renowned international specialists are continually invited to participate as guest lecturers.
This places the scientific education of the postgraduate programme in Cognitive Science and Language on a comparable level of quality to the leading postgraduate programmes in Europe, particularly in the interdisciplinary areas of cognitive science.

Learning objectives

The general objective of the master's degree in Cognitive Science and Language is to provide training to language researchers from three scientific perspectives: those of the linguist, the cognitive psychologist and the analytic philosopher. Interdisciplinary training in each of these areas will enable students to monitor and appraise new contributions in the other two areas.