Professor Lahiri receives unprecedented sixth ERC Grant

We're delighted to announce that Professor Aditi Lahiri of the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics has been awarded a prestigious Synergy Grant by the European Research Council (ERC), making her the recipient of a record-breaking six ERC grants.

Professor Lahiri is the founder of the University of Oxford’s Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics, and a leading figure in the world of linguistics globally. She is undertaking a collaborative project with Paula Fikkert (Radboud University, The Netherlands) and Linda Wheeldon and Allison Wetterlin (both University of Agder in Kristiansand, Norway).

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’s abstract states, "We view cognisance as part of the native speaker’s core knowledge of their language. Our working hypothesis is that phonological cognisance and representation govern spoken and written language processing, language acquisition and change."

Commenting on the grant, Professor Lahiri said,

I am deeply honoured to receive this grant... It will be a special privilege to be able to closely interact with colleagues in Norway and the Netherlands. And, as always, the success of all grants depends on the hard work of the postdoctoral fellows. These are the scholars who should be feted.

Professor Colin Phillips, of the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics, commented:

Aditi Lahiri is unstoppable. And that is very good news for all of us. This new award, the latest in a long line of ERC awards to Aditi’s team, will help to keep Oxford Linguistics and Somerville College at the centre of interdisciplinary approaches to language into the next decade. This new project is a fabulous international collaboration, and we are very much looking forward to supporting it.