Friedemann Pulvermüller

Friedemann Pulvermüller is Professor in Neuroscience of Language and Pragmatics at the Freie Universität Berlin and head of the Brain Language Laboratory since 2011. He received his first PhD in linguistics at the University of Tübingen 1989 and a second one in Psychology at the University of Kostanz 1999. Before, he had been Programme Leader in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Language at the Medical Research Council’s Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge. Prof. Pulvermüller has developed a model of language processing in the human brain, formulated at the level of nerve cell circuits, which cuts across perception and action systems of the brain. The model specifies neural circuits processing speech sounds, words, their meaning and combinatorial structure. Words are envisaged to be represented in the brain by distributed cell assemblies whose cortical topographies reflect aspects of word meaning (reference). Most recently, his group has been focusing on the communicative role of language and the way communicative function is reflected in brain activity. His experimental work has led to novel and efficient methods for speech-language therapy in patients with neurological language deficits.