PhD position in Language Sciences, in the area of language and psychosis
PhD position in Language Sciences, in the area of language and psychosis
This position is for a PhD researcher funded by the Synergy project DELTA-LANG, ‘The Delta of Language’, awarded by the European Research Council (ERC) and running from 2024-2029. The successful candidate will join the group of Prof. Wolfram Hinzen, https://www.upf.edu/web/grac in the Language Sciences department of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), as well as the group of Prof. Gustavo Deco at the Brain & Cognition center https://www.upf.edu/web/cbc. He/she will also become part of a wider European consortium comprising three other sites, the groups of Prof. Homan at the Psychiatrische Universitätsklinik Zürich, Prof. Sommer of the psychiatry department at the University Medical Center Groningen, and Prof. Elvevåg of the Department of Clinical Medicine at The Arctic University of Norway. Regular exchanges and visits to these other sites are foreseen.
The project aims to define the potential of a speech biomarker of psychosis with a specific view to predicting psychotic relapses, using methods of AI (Large Language Models), natural language processing (NLP), and computational neuroscience to illuminate anomalies in language processing in schizophrenia and related disorders. At the Barcelona end, a language model of psychosis will be developed based on unprecedented crosslinguistic data and the hypothesis that language is a critical neurocognitive principle for the organization of thought in humans. Testing the model for its crosslinguistic generalizability across psychosis samples in different languages will be key. We mainly focus on semantic processing and have a more specific focus on how speakers with psychosis navigate the semantic space when constructing meaning in speech. Our linguistic model will be related to brain changes associated with psychosis using fMRI, and to mental state fluctuations over time, in a different work package. The successful candidate will elaborate an independent project within this broad theoretical and empirical frame.
The contract will be full-time and have a duration of minimally one year, and will be extendable to a maximum of four years.
- Position description and application
- Open date: 22 April 2024
- Application deadline: 20 May 2024