UniSoMedSci: Uniting laboratory procedures across the social and medical sciences

We align laboratory procedures across linguistics (Mooshammer, Knoeferle), rehabilitation (Villwock), and medical sciences (Klostermann). When examining a joint research question, much added impact can be gained by unifying methods. For instance, if we examine the effects of the body on language processing in healthy adults and in Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients, we could do this at the Charité. But combining different lab methods and perspectives would better address research questions of broad interest. For example, approaches comprising brain, behavioral, and contextual measures, could overcome limitations of isolated psychological, neuroscientific, or social perspectives on linguistic topics as important as the interplay between body state and language processing. In addition, by unifying procedures (across laboratories differing as much in their know-how, training, and background as the medical, rehabilitation, and linguistic sciences), we could facilitate (exact) replication. The seed money will
help us to establish a first medical-to-social-and-linguistic-sciences laboratory coordination via topping up existing staff to 100%. The staff technician is affiliated with the HU, trained in event-related brain potentials in all three labs, and in the techniques of the Phonetics/Phonology lab (e.g. Electromagnetic articulography ‘EMA’ and RespTrack, a system for measuring and real-time monitoring of respiratory movements). In the process the laboratory technician would set up 1-2 unified paradigms for future experiments, jointly with student assistants.This coordination permits us to set up a shared paradigm and analyses. The wider community will hopefully benefit, too, from more homogeneous laboratory procedures and guidelines for how to set up close collaborations across the linguistic, rehabilitation, and medical sciences.