Loneliness and social isolation have become a significant problem in contemporary Japan. The financial burden associated with an ageing population has severely constrained the ability of local authorities to address the problem. As a result, policymakers have sought cost‐effective methods of tackling…

Most degree programmes at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences are based in the Pieter de la Court building on the Wassenaarseweg in Leiden. Besides this location, some degree programmes are based in The Hague, at Campus The Hague’s Wijnhaven building.

Understanding others’ emotional behavior is essential for navigating daily social life. But how is such an understanding achieved? The eye-tracking study by Yung-Ting Tsou and colleagues shows that children with hearing loss adopt a unique visual strategy that makes uses of explicit visual information…

Programs that aim to reduce symptoms of social anxiety in children generally include multiple components, such as exposure and cognitive restructuring. It is unknown if separate components yield positive intervention effects in children or whether a combination of components is required.

Attitudes towards cultural heritage have long been characterised by an ‘endangerment sensibility’ concerned with preventing losses. Recently, however, critical heritage scholars have argued that loss can be generative, facilitating the formation of new values and attachments. Their arguments have focused…

Tonal bilinguals of two closely related Chinese dialects are amazing people. They handle two tonal systems in their mind; their two vocabularies are from closely related dialects, and they write translation equivalents with common Chinese characters. Their unique language situation makes their mind…

This publication aims at the analysis of the performance of a corpus of Fongbe stories that I collected in three villages in the south of Benin in 1976 and 1977. The corpus consists of 37 stories (57.000 words). The stories aim at children’s education.

The Disticha Catonis by Catenaccio of Anagni. A text in vernacular from Latium (late 13th - early 14th century)

This dissertation investigates Extended Lexical Units (ELUs), elements that are bigger than just one word and which are stored in the Lexicon.

This research project is funded by a subsidy from Instituut Gak.

The Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences brings together high-quality research and outstanding teaching.

This dissertation the role of the English dissenting minister Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) as a grammarian is studied.

How does having limited access to the social world affect Deaf or Hard of Hearing (DHH) children’s emotional development? And in turn, how do impairments in emotional functioning affect social development and the development of psychopathology?

Book by Soledad Valdivia Rivera

This research aims to investigate how different social forces interact with hydropolitics in the Eastern Nile Basin and what are the constraints of engagement.

Within the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences (FSW), D&I translates as the diversity of backgrounds, perspectives, and identities among both students and staff.

The making of sacrifices seems part and parcel of any elite sportsperson’s life. Remarkably, the insights that we find in the current literature in social sport studies are not able to make sense of the references to sacrifice in the data that emerged in the context of this study on the social significance…

On March 16th, students from all over the world visited Leiden's Humanities Faculty to explore their options during the Master's Open Day. 'Leiden is a beautiful city, I feel like I could definitely study here.'

Songbirds as vocal learners learn their songs and song preference from social tutors⁠. Tutor choice for both song and preference learning are important to characterize for understanding individual learning performance and cultural transmission of song⁠.

What is the role of emotion regulation in coping with interpersonal feedback?

The aim of this thesis was to study the link between hearing loss, language skills, and social functioning in deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children. Sufficient language skills are an essential prerequisite to develop appropriate communication skills, in order to join in conversations with others.…

Deepfakes are videos that have been manipulated to replace one person’s likeness with that of another. They can be difficult to distinguish from authentic videos. In our study, we found that people who score high on conspiracy thinking and people who use social media more are better at distinguishing…

With the emergence of online social networks (OSNs), the way people create and share information has changed, which becomes faster and broader than traditional social media.

D.P. Kok defended his thesis on 10 October 2017

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The Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences brings together high-quality research and outstanding mono- and multidisciplinary teaching.

This grammar describes Sumerian, an ancient Near Eastern language which was spoken in what is now southern Iraq, on the basis of written sources dating from about 2500 to 2000 BC.

Ancient Greek was spoken in a large number of different dialects. Although we do not find direct evidence for syllabic liquids in any of our sources, comparative evidence shows that these sounds must have been present in Proto-Greek, and that they were retained until comparatively recently in the prehistory…

In the new video series 'The World of Linguistics', alumni and researchers talk about their passion for their field. Professor of African Linguistics Maarten Mous explains the importance of hearing your language at school.

In the new video series 'The World of Linguistics', alumni and researchers talk about their passion for their field. PhD candidate Meike de Boer knows everything about the word ‘uh’.

In this project we study the properties of statistical- and rule-learning mechanisms in relation to the acquisition and evolution of language. We ask to what extent these mechanisms are unique to humans - or to human language - by comparing the acquisition of vocal structure in two species: humans (infants)…

What can languages spoken in the Lesser Sunda Islands today tell us about the histories of its various population groups?

Together with Pepijn Tuinier and Thijs Brocades Zaalberg, Sebastiaan Rietjens researched the role of trust in an international intelligence cooperation.

Since criticising the war in Ukraine, Russian author and cardiologist Maxim Osipov has fled Russia. Come September, he will be Leiden University’s writer in residence and teach a course on Russian literature.

This dissertation provides a grammatical description of Ghomara Berber, a Berber language spoken in North-West Morocco by about 10.000 people. The grammar consists of a description of the phonology, the morphology and the syntax. In the appendices a number of texts and a wordlist are included. The data…

Simulating human language understanding on the computer is a great challenge. A way to approach it is to represent natural language meanings in logic, and to use logical provers to determine what does and does not follow from a text. What logic is best to use and how natural language meanings are best…