Projects
Learning Dutch in Flanders. The acquisition of sociolinguistic variation with adult L2 learners Ghent University
Acquisition of sociolinguistic variation is increasingly considered essential for L2 speakers. At the same time it poses challenges, especially for late language learners. This project focuses on the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation by late starting learners in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. Flanders offers a fascinating context for this project, because the linguistic landscape is strongly dominated by non-standard ...
Scientific support fund: Universal Compassion and Prosociality: An Interdisciplinary Project on the Variation and Cultivation of Universal Compassion and Its Relationship to Social Emotions, Prejudice and Prosocial Behavior in Youth (VOPPU95) Vrije Universiteit Brussel
challenge to develop cooperative social relationships within groups
and, especially in increasingly diverse societies, between groups.
Scientific research on meditation- and mindfulness-based mental
training interventions has grown and has shown positive effects on
both well-being and prosocial behavior. However, little research
exists that ...
An integrated CRISPR/iPSC-based approach to elucidate uncertain variation in RPE65, a target for gene therapy Ghent University
In 2017 and 2018, Luxturna received FDA and EMA approval as the first gene therapy product to treat patients with biallelic RPE65-mutations, causing severe inherited blindness. Eligibility for gene therapy requires a complete molecular diagnosis, which is often hampered by the identification of variants of uncertain significance (VUS). To this end, we first will set up a biochemical assay to assess the pathogenicity of coding RPE65 VUS, by ...
The development of socially meaningful language variation in (pre)adolescents with Down Syndrome KU Leuven
This project studies the development of the social meaning of linguistic variation in (pre)adolescents with Down Syndrome (DS), given their unique developmental profile with strengths in social functioning and challenges with linguistic processing. The system for pronouns of address in Belgian Dutch displays two dimensions of socially meaningful variation (T/V and standard/colloquial) and serves as a case study. The key innovations are the ...
The development of lexical biases in grammatical variation. Exemplar-driven and index-driven lectal contamination. KU Leuven
Mechanisms of language variation and change often take as starting point lexical biases in grammatical variation, i.e. the finding that particular words engender speakers to prefer one construction over another while forming utterances. For example, a frequent word that is biased towards a construction may attract similar words through analogy, creating a new conjugation class. What is unclear, however, is how such lexical biases develop in ...
Assessment of out-of-field doses in proton therapy with variation of clinical parameters KU Leuven
Nowadays pencil beam scanning (PBS) is the most promising form of proton therapy (PT) with clear reduction in out-of-field doses compared to older PT techniques and conventional photon radiotherapy [W. Newhauser, Phys Med Biol, 2015]. Nevertheless, PT is unavoidably accompanied by the production of secondary high-energy neutrons in the patient and structural materials of the beamline [Stolarczyk, Phys Med Biol, 2018]. Neutrons are of ...
INGENIOUS HETEROGENEOUS BEANS: unravelling variation during hydrothermal processing and digestion KU Leuven
Relatively complex or relatively simple? Toward new ways of analyzing language variation KU Leuven
In the mind of the scribe: an integrated sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic approach to orthographic variation and change in the Greek language of the papyri Ghent University
This project proposes to combine for the first time historical (socio)linguistics with the insights from modern psycholinguistic research to study linguistic variation in post-Classical Greek. For this purpose the study will use the corpus of Greek documentary papyri, an important source for our knowledge of the history of Greek after the Classical period (ca. 300 BCE – 800 CE). The project builds on existing infrastructure developed by the ...