ON LANGUAGE, COGNITION, AND THE BRAIN: AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER HAGOORT
Managing Director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, founding Director of the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging (DCCN, 1999) and professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Radboud University, all located in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, PETER HAGOORT examines how the brain controls language production and comprehension. He was one of the first to integrate psychological theory and models from neuroscience in an attempt to understand how the human language faculty is instantiated in the brain. Prof. Hagoort is the proponent of an influential neurocognitive model of language processing, the Memory, Unification, and Control model (MUC) A crucial aspect of the MUC model is its emphasis on the dynamic nature of the language ready brain, both in terms of the complex integration of brain regions that support the various aspects of language processing and of the interface between language, other cognitive systems such as memory and executive control, and the environment where human interaction takes place. Dr. Peter Hagoort's thoughts on language, cognition, and the brain have been presented in countless theoretical and empirical articles published in the most important journals of Linguistics, Psychology, and Cognitive Neuroscience, as well as in books, edited volumes, and at conferences. He has been awarded various prestigeous (international) Prizes for his scholarly contributions to the field, among them the NWO( Spinoza prize. Already a member of several learned societies, he has recently been elected to the U.S. Academy of Sciences (NAS) as a Foreign Associate "in recogniztion of [his]