Profossor for the Neuroscience of Language and Pragmatics at the Institute of German and Dutch Languages and Literatures and the Cluster Languages of Emotion at the Freie Universität Berlin

Trained in a truly interdisciplinary manner as a linguist, biologist, and psychologist, Friedemann Pulvermüller has made outstanding and highly respected contributions to the flourishing new field of the neuroscience of language, as testified by his publications and his appointment as Program Leader in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Language to one of the world-leading cognitive neuroscience centres, the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (MRC CBU) in Cambridge. By having appointed him to the Freie Universität Berlin and to the Cluster Languages of Emotions we develop further the research spectrum of the Cluster.

Profile

Pulvermüller's main theoretical contribution is the first linguistically informed mechanistic model of human language. In a range of articles and in his book "The Neuroscience of Language" (Cambridge University Press, 2003), he laid out the neuron circuits in the brain that underpin specifically linguistic functions, including meaning access and composition, syntactic sequencing and merging, and phonological classification and programming. In his distinguished and truly interdisciplinary research, Pulvermüller performed a long series of experimental studies, bringing to fruit neuroimaging methods, especially EEG, MEG and fMRI, as well as psycholinguistic and neuropsychological techniques, including TMS and patient studies, to test his models.

His work was, in part, triggered by the advent of similarly new ground-breaking theories, such as the embodied cognition framework in cognitive psychology (Barsalou, Glenberg) and the mirror neuron theory in neuroscience (Rizzolatti, Gallese, Fadiga), with both of which Pulvermüller’s brain-language theory converges synergistically. In the linguistic and psycholinguistic domain, Pulvermüller’s work acts as a neuroscience-grounded complement to recent theoretical developments, as seen, for example, in the field of cognitive and construction grammar (Goldberg, Lakoff). Furthermore, his work has yielded concrete neuromechanistic models of the intrinsic links between language and emotion processing, thus making him an ideal integration point in the context of the  Cluster of Excellence Languages of Emotion at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Career

Friedemann Pulvermüller studied Biology and Linguistics at the University of Tübingen and holds Ph.D. degrees in Linguistics (Dr. phil., dissertation: "Aphasic Communication") and Psychology (Dr. rer. soc., dissertation: "Neuronal Grammar"), along with Habilitation (on "Neurobiology of Language") degrees in Psychology and Medicine (Behavioural Neuroscience).

He received several awards, among them the highly prestigious Early Career Award of the Society for Psychophysiological Research, a Helmholtz and a Heisenberg Fellowship; he has been elected a member of the Rodin Remediation Academy, Stockholm. As a further reflection of his high international standing in interdisciplinary science, he is acting as editorial board member or guest editor for linguistic and neuroscience journals (Editorial boards: Brain and Language, Frontiers in Neurosciences, Brain Topography, Biolinguistics; Guest editor: Cortex, Neural Networks, Brain and Language).

Selected Publications

Pulvermüller’s position on language, brain and emotion has been laid out in a range of cutting edge publications, for example the following:

Pulvermüller, F., & Schumann, J. H. (1994). Neurobiological mechanisms of language acquisition. Language Learning, 44, 681-734.

Pulvermüller, F. (1999). Words in the brain's language. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 253-336.

Pulvermüller, F. (2001). Brain reflections of words and their meaning. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 5(12), 517-524.

Pulvermüller, F. (2005). Brain mechanisms linking language and action. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 6(7), 576-582.

Pulvermüller, F., & Fadiga, L. (2010). Active perception: Sensorimotor circuits as a cortical basis for language. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(5), 351-360.

Pulvermüller, F. (2010). Brain-language research: Where is the progress? Biolinguistics, 4(2-3), 255-288.

Kiefer, M., & Pulvermüller, F. (2011). Conceptual representations in mind and brain: Theoretical developments, current evidence and future directions. Cortex, in press.

Pulvermüller, F. (2011). Meaning and the brain: The neurosemantics of referential, interactive, and combinatorial knowledge. Journal of Neurolinguistics, in press.