About the lab

Founded in 1994, the ‘Dynamique Du Langage’ (DDL) laboratory is a Mixed Research Unit of the CNRS and Université Lumière Lyon 2 (part of Université de Lyon).

The research unit's focus is the interface between language diversity and human cognitive capacity, using a variety of interdisciplinary approaches. Our research lies at the heart of major challenges of our times: from understanding language development in children and in language pathologies to issues of language documentation (especially of endangered languages) as well as the investigation of the origins of language.

Our core expertise is in linguistics and cognitive neurosciences which serve as the foundation for a large spectrum of multidisciplinary research approaches. Since 2020, the research unit is structured around two research axes (DENDY and DILIS : a fusion of the previous DTT and HELAN² axes) and a transversal theme (COVALI)

Development, Neurocognition, Disorders (DENDY),
	which explores language development and processing as a complex phenomenon in typical populations (monolinguals, bilinguals), atypical populations (premature children, children with dyslexia or with developmental language disorders) and populations with pathologies (Alzheimer’s disease) in a life span perspective.

Linguistic Diversity and its Sources (DiLiS),
the principal goals of which are to describe and document un(der)described languages in order to gain a better understanding of the extent of crosslinguistic diversity, as well as to study the language-internal and external factors that play a role in the emergence of this diversity.

Perceptual-motor COntraints and LInguistic VAriation (COVALI),

which seeks to examine how sensory and motor rules can invade semantic typology by constraining perception and trajectory descriptions.

The approaches we use in our research are inspired by different fields of human and social sciences (anthropology, ethnology, psychology, cognitive sciences), life sciences (neurosciences, génétique des populations), as well as informatics (modeling, databases) and complexity (network models, dynamic complex systems).

The research unit is part of extensive networks at the regional, national and international level investigating a variety of globally relevant issues: language description and typology, documentation and archiving of undescribed or little known languages, interaction between language and motor skills, language development in children, language pathologies, etc.).

Additionally, the research unit is a member of the ASLAN project (Advanced Studies on LAnguage Complexity), which we coordinated from 2011 to March 2018, and which involves 300 researchers, faculty members, and PhD students.

Updated on 03/02/21