Katya Müller | Der Kleine Prinz: Natural language processing in brains and trained algorithms: a systematic study in German (Hybrid Mode)

Open Science has developed rapidly in the field of cognitive neuroscience in recent years, and more and more researchers are now making their research data publicly available so that other neuroscientists can use it for their work. In the meantime, there are even various data sets that have been developed exclusively for the purpose of data sharing without being linked to specific questions. One such initiative currently underway is the acquisition of "The Little Prince", in which several international research teams are collecting multimodal brain data in humans while they listen to the audiobook "The Little Prince". The goal of these datasets to be collected is to generate a multilingual collection of datasets for language research in cognitive neuroscience as well as so-called Natural Language Processing (NLP) from the field of artificial intelligence research, in the hope that these data will significantly expand our understanding of the underlying language mechanisms in the human brain. So far, several languages are represented, including English and French, but a German version is still lacking. To fill this gap, this study plans to use magnetoencephalography to record the temporal dynamics of brain activations related to the audio book "The Little Prince" in 35 German-speaking subjects. This dataset will be made publicly available and thereby make a key contribution to Open Science. The study thus has the potential to significantly expand our knowledge in the field of language processing in the human brain and our understanding of the similarities and differences between languages.