People
Dr. Lars Meyer
Group Leader
I am a cognitive neuroscientist trained as a linguist at the universities of Hanover, DE, Groningen, NL, Joensuu, FI, and Potsdam DE. I am interested in the electrophysiology of language. Specifically, I investigate the role of periodic activity—so-called neural oscillations—in sentence comprehension. I employ neuroimaging (e.g., electro– and magnetoencephalography, functional and structural MRI) on a range of populations (e.g., developmental, healthy, aging, and clinical).
Lena Henke
PhD Student
Before coming to Leipzig, I was trained in cognitive science and clinical linguistics and initially joined the Language Cycles team for my Master’s thesis. In my research, I investigate how low-frequent intrinsic activity of the brain temporally constraints perception and thereby influences language comprehension. Specifically, I am interested in the upper limit of this constraint taking into account inter- and intraindividual variability.
Lorenzo Titone
PhD Student
My educational background is in Psychological Sciences (Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, BSc.) and in Cognitive Neuroscience (Maastricht University, MSc.) My current research interests are on neural oscillatory dynamics, entrainment, statistical learning, and predictive processing. During my PhD at the Language Cycles research group I am focussing on the effects of temporal predictions in language processing using advanced non-invasive brain imaging techniques such as magnetoencephalography (MEG).
Jule Nabrotzky
PhD Student
I’ve studied linguistics on the Bachelor level at the CAU Kiel (Germany) & Åbo Akademi (Finland) and obtained my Master’s degree in Phonetics at Lund University (Sweden). I am interested in the neural processing of spoken speech in interactive contexts, especially the processing of prosodic contours and the multimodal coordination of speech. As part of my PhD in the Language Cycles group I’m using neuroimaging to investigate entrainment to acoustic and gestural cues. Specifically, I’m exploring how the rhythmicity of these speech cues helps with the predictive timing of turn-taking in conversation.
Filip Miščević
PhD Student
I completed my Bachelor of Science in cognitive science, neuroscience, and computer science, and a Master of Science in Applied Computing, at the University of Toronto. My research interests span computational linguistics, cognitive modelling, and brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). For my PhD research, I aim to develop neurofeedback-based BCIs for improving auditory attention and speech perception.
Suong Welp
PhD Student
I have a Psychology BSc from Hamburg university and a Neurocognitive Psychology MSc from Oldenburg university. My research focuses on the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying inner speech and auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH). In my PhD, I investigate the role of predictive coding in AVH, utilizing complementary neuroimaging techniques to explore both the spatial and linguistic dimensions of these phenomena.
Dylan Scott Low
PhD Student
I am a cognitive scientist. My work can be broadly described as reverse-engineering the algorithms used by the human mind to compute natural language syntax. Specifically, I evaluate theoretically-interpretable computational models of human sentence processing against neural time-series data. I am especially interested in multilingualism and functional grammars — I strongly believe that realistic models of the human mind must be informed by realistic models of human social life. My main academic home is in the Department of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, where I am a PhD student working with Prof. John Hale. Before Hopkins, I completed an MA in Linguistics at National Taiwan Normal University where I worked in an EEG lab. I come from Singapore and did a BA in English Communication at Payap University in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
Jianhao Wei
PhD Student
My educational background is in Mechatronic Engineering (Chang’an University, BEng) and Biomedical Engineering (Technische Universität Berlin, MSc). My research interests lie at the intersection of neuroscience, biomedical engineering, and computational signal processing. During my PhD at the Language Cycles research group, I use magnetoencephalography (MEG) and behavioral experiments to investigate the neural mechanisms of developmental language disorders and stuttering, with a particular focus on neural oscillations, auditory–motor synchronization, and motor timing.
Martina Dvořáková
PhD Student
I am a PhD researcher in developmental neurolinguistics interested in the earliest stages of language acquisition. My research focuses on speech processing in newborns using non-invasive neuroimaging methods, primarily electroencephalography (EEG) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). I investigate how the newborn brain processes speech and the neural mechanisms that support early language learning, with a particular interest in neural speech tracking. My current research explores the role of speech rhythm during the prenatal and early postnatal period and I aim to better understand the neural foundations of language acquisition and the mechanisms that shape language development from birth.
Caroline Duchow
Lab Manager
I studied linguistics at the universities of Leipzig and Erfurt. While conducting an internship and writing my Master’s thesis at the Max-Planck-Institute, my interest in neurolinguistics grew. As the lab manager of this research group, I hope to gain more insights into the work of scientists and support them wherever I can.
Former Members
