Position

This position is for a PhD researcher funded by the Synergy project DELTA-LANG, ‘The Delta of Language’, awarded by the European Research Council (ERC) and running from 2024-2029. The successful candidate will join the group of Prof. Wolfram Hinzen, https://www.upf.edu/web/grac in the Language Sciences department of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), as well as the group of Prof. Gustavo Deco at the Brain & Cognition center https://www.upf.edu/web/cbc. He/she will also become part of a wider European consortium comprising three other sites, the groups of Prof. Homan at the Psychiatrische Universitätsklinik Zürich, Prof. Sommer of the psychiatry department at the University Medical Center Groningen, and Prof. Elvevåg of the Department of Clinical Medicine at The Arctic University of Norway. Regular exchanges and visits to these other sites are foreseen.

The project aims to define the potential of a speech biomarker of psychosis with a specific view to predicting psychotic relapses, using methods of AI (Large Language Models), natural language processing (NLP), and computational neuroscience to illuminate anomalies in language processing in schizophrenia and related disorders. At the Barcelona end, a language model of psychosis will be developed based on unprecedented crosslinguistic data and the hypothesis that language is a critical neurocognitive principle for the organization of thought in humans. Testing the model for its crosslinguistic generalizability across psychosis samples in different languages will be key. We mainly focus on semantic processing and have a more specific focus on how speakers with psychosis navigate the semantic space when constructing meaning in speech. Our linguistic model will be related to brain changes associated with psychosis using fMRI, and to mental state fluctuations over time, in a different work package. The successful candidate will elaborate an independent project within this broad theoretical and empirical frame.

The contract will be full-time and have a duration of minimally one year, and will be extendable to a maximum of four years.

Tasks

• Creative development of an independent research project on semantic processing in patients with psychosis, in conversation with senior project members.
• Data analysis of speech samples from patients and controls in a crosslinguistic database, using NLP.
• Contribution to new data acquisitions with clinical partners.
• Some contribution to the organization of the project on a day-to-day level.
• Publication of results at conferences and in peer-reviewed journals.
• Potential contribution to neuroimaging projects within the group and the consortium.

We offer

• A multi-disciplinary and international research environment comprising aspects of computational linguistics, computational neuroscience and psychiatry, cognitive neuroscience, neurolinguistics, and brain imaging.
• Close PhD supervision by the PI and a multidisciplinary team across two departments at the UPF.
• Research contacts across a large European consortium.
• Training opportunities in neuroimaging and the analysis of complex multi-modal data.
• Training opportunities in psychiatry.

For inquiries please contact the PI at wolfram.hinzen@upf.edu.