Human language ability and its expression in individual languages
The ZAS researches human language ability and its development in individual languages. The aim is to gain a better understanding of this central human ability and its biological, cognitive and social factors. By understanding the structures of language, its acquisition and its processing, the basis is created for applications, e.g. in the field of language diagnostics or language technology.
The ZAS is internationally positioned and is divided into four research areas in which experts from many core areas of linguistics are active: Phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, semantics and pragmatics as well as child language acquisition. This concentration of active research in many linguistic sub-disciplines in a single institution is unique in Germany and enables a direct exchange of current research results and methods. A phonetics laboratory, a psycholinguistics laboratory, a motion capture laboratory and a children's language laboratory can be used at the ZAS for empirical testing and experimental modeling of predictions. In addition, the scientific work at ZAS is based on corpus linguistic methods and field research.
The research program of the ZAS is aligned with specific research topics, which determine the work at least in the medium term over four to six years. Ideally, a research topic calls on the expertise of several research areas. Each research area also hosts externally acquired third-party funded projects that contribute to the content of one or more of the research topics. The ZAS is very successful in acquiring such funding. The excellent international reputation of the ZAS makes it an attractive research location for international guest researchers and scholarship holders. Their collaboration as well as the numerous national and international workshops and conferences provide important impulses for the scientific work at ZAS.
The extensive research library of the ZAS is not only available to employees of the institute, but also to other linguistic institutions and students of linguistics courses in Berlin and Potsdam. The ZAS is also responsible for university teaching and the coordination of linguistic research in Berlin and EU collaborative projects. Furthermore, the ZAS is involved in various interdisciplinary research networks and associations of the Leibniz Association.
In terms of knowledge transfer to politics and society, the ZAS plays a particularly important role in the area of multilingualism, for example, at regional, national and international level. The findings from basic research are incorporated into day-to-day political decisions in a variety of ways, as well as into the development of diagnostic procedures and training programs for educators.

Leibniz Center for General Linguistics
Pariser Straße 1
10719 Berlin
+49 (0)30 201924-01
post(at)leibniz-zas.de
www.leibniz-zas.de