[4] The MPI for Psycholinguistics is a globally recognized center of linguistics and presents with its international archive of endangered languages a significant contribution to the preservation of the common heritage of mankind.

The department takes advantage of the latest innovations in molecular methods to discover how the human genome helps to build a language-ready brain.

It aims to uncover the DNA variations, which ultimately affect different facets of human communicative abilities, not only in children with language-related disorders but also in the general population.

Its work attempts to bridge the gaps between genes, brains, speech, and language, by integrating molecular findings with data from other levels of analysis, including cell biology, experimental psychology, and neuroimaging.

In addition, it hopes to trace the evolutionary history and worldwide diversity of key genes, which may shed new light on language origins.

This project focused on core theoretical issues in speech comprehension such as on how episodic memories (e.g., hearing someone speak in an unfamiliar dialect) influence the speech perception system, or how prior knowledge about one's language (phonotactic probabilities, lexical knowledge, frequent versus infrequent word combinations) is used during perception.

Their work is motivated by the idea that there is a psychological basis of human communication that develops ontogenetically prior to language and can be first expressed in gestures.

Headed by Michael Dunn, the group takes a modern evolutionary perspective, using computational tools from genetics and biology, and integrating probabilistic, quantified approaches to phylogenetics with rigorous tests of different models of the interaction between elements of language, contact and geography, and cultural variation.

Another major task of the group is to investigate and re-evaluate the status of the information structure primitives (topic, focus, contrast, etc.)