Professor Aditi Lahiri presented ‘The Structure of sounds in mental representations – old manuscripts, new brains’ in the Speakers Corner at the ’40 Years of the Leibniz Prizes’ event that took place on 19th March 2025 in Berlin. This prestigious event celebrated The German Research Foundation awarding its annual Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize for the 40th time. As a past recipient of the Leibniz Prize Professor Lahiri used the funding to support research that eventually led to the establishment of the Language and Brain Laboratory at the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics in 2008.
The Leibniz Programme, established in 1985, aims to honour outstanding scientists and academics, expand their research opportunities, and help them employ particularly qualified early career researchers. The Leibniz Prize is a unique honour, unparalleled in the academic world in permitting one not only to be able to conduct challenging research which would otherwise be difficult to find funding for, but to do so without unnecessary bureaucratic constraints The Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize is the highest academic award in Germany, and is now worth up to €2.5 million to each recipient. In 2000 the winners of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Programme comprised eleven male and three female scientists, including Professor Aditi Lahiri. Professor Ernst Ludwig Winnacker, who later served as the first Secretary General of the European Research Council (2007-9), presented Professor Lahiri with her prize in 2000. On that occasion, he said that the prize was awarded without reference to subject, gender or nationality, but only as a recognition for research in German academia.
Professor Aditi Lahiri works in the field of phonology, a sub-discipline of linguistics that deals with the function of sounds in a language system. After completing her PhD in comparative philology and linguistics at the University of Calcutt, she studied at Brown University, USA receiving a second PhD in linguistics. She has worked at the University of California in Los Angeles, the University of California in Santa Cruz and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, and in 1992 became Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Konstanz.
Professor Lahiri used her Leibniz prize money to fund research that she had never done before in neurolinguistics and automatic speech recognition. The research undertaken with the Leibniz funds was completed in 2005, and soon after Professor Lahiri was offered the position of the Chair of Linguistics at the University of Oxford in 2007, where she further progressed her research and established the Language and Brain Laboratory. This facility continues to be an active research laboratory that covers all aspects of linguistics having been supported by 3 major ERC grants as well as UKRI funding. Professor Lahiri and her team will soon be commencing work on a prestigious European Research Council Synergy grant that has recently been awarded.
More information about The Language and Brain Laboratory can be found at Home | Language and Brain Laboratory and about the Faculty of Linguistics Philology and Phonetics at About the Faculty | Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics.
You can watch the ceremony on the website for the Leibniz Prize. And there is a short video about the Leibniz Prize that you can watch here.