Professor Lahiri Awarded Unprecedented Fourth Major European Research Council Grant

The Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics is thrilled to announce that Professor Aditi Lahiri has been awarded a prestigious Synergy Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). This comes in addition to her three Advanced Investigator Grants, already unprecedented at Oxford, the latest of which, Pertinacity, is ongoing until 2027.

Synergy grants are the largest awards made by the ERC, and up to 14 million Euros over the 6 year period of the grant has been awarded jointly to Paula Fikkert (Radboud University, The Netherlands) Aditi Lahiri (University of Oxford, UK), Linda Wheeldon and Allison Wetterlin (both University of Agder in Kristiansand, Norway), with Oxford receiving 3.2 million Euros over the 6 years.

The project title is Phonological cognisance and allied linguistic representations: acquisition, bilingualism, change and script (PAAL). PAAL’s objective is to investigate the interaction of phonological representations with cognisance, and their relationship to script.

The project abstract explains its activity and aims:

“We view cognisance as part of the native speaker’s core knowledge of their language. This includes generalisations about constraints on phonological representations in terms of features, size and shapes of morphemes, tone and metrical structures. We argue that cognisance is involved in all levels of language processing and change, in both spoken and written modalities. Speakers may have different vocabularies — but the phonological cognisance of individuals within a speech community should converge. Our working hypothesis is that phonological cognisance and representation govern spoken and written language processing, language acquisition and change.”