"Cognition, Société et Langage" is devoted to empirical research in linguistics. This research adopts a functional approach to language and focuses on experimental phonetics and usage-based meaning construction. Especially important to much of the research is the role of socio-cultural variation within and between languages.

Experimental Phonetics - segmental and suprasegmental

The research on speech sounds conducted in this group focuses on atypical speech (disfluency, interlanguage in foreign/second language acquisition) as well as the social dimensions of speech (gender and language, discourse and prosody).

Construction and Sense - non-modular multimodal structure

Language structure is understood from a cognitive-functional perspective as non-modular, emergent from use, and multimodal in nature. This line of research is especially concerned with discourse, gesture, social variation and quantitative modelling of qualitative linguistic analysis.