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Language in the mind and in the brain

Professor William Marslen-Wilson


The fundamental scientific question posed by human language is to understand how speech creates structure and meaning in the mind of the listener. Scientists are beginning to piece together an answer to this question, using novel neuro-imaging techniques (PET, MRI) to map out the ways in which the building blocks of linguistic function - words and sentences - programme the brain to create the structured meanings intended by the speaker.

William Marslen-Wilson was educated at Oxford and MIT, where he received a PhD in Experimental Psycholinguistics, and has taught and conducted research in Chicago, Cambridge, London and Nijmegen. He was Director of the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, before returning to the UK as Professor of Psychology in Birkbeck College, where he was Co-Director of the Birkbeck Centre for Speech and Language. He is now Director of the Medical Research Council's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge. For 25 years he has been a leading figure in the experimental study of how humans understand spoken language, pioneering a range of techniques for studying the dynamic processes that take place in the mind of the listener as speech is heard and interpreted. His recent work, in the new field of the cognitive neuroscience of language, emphasises the role of neural systems that underpin the cognitive system of language function.