[Lingtyp] PhD Position in Cross-Linguistic Sentence Planning at ISLE Institute, University of Zurich

[Lena Zipp]

The ISLE Institute invites applications for a PhD position in a project that probes the neural correlates for sentence planning cross-linguistically. The project is embedded in the NCCR Evolving Language (www.evolvinglanguage.ch<http://www.evolvinglanguage.ch/>), a Swiss consortium with the ambitious goal of creating a new discipline, Evolutionary Language Science, that targets the past and future of language and draws on expertise from the social, natural, and computational sciences.
Your responsibilities
You will design and conduct neurolinguistic experiments that improve our understanding of sentence planning processes as conditioned by maximally diverse languages. Based on these you are expected to complete within 4 years 3 PhD dissertation papers together with your supervisors and potentially other contributors from the lab, the institute, or the NCCR consortium (as the need and/or interest arises). You will determine the choice of languages with your supervisor based on the specific research question but we generally prefer areas where we already have active research collaborations in psycho-/neurolinguistics (Nepal, Vietnam, Peru, and the Philippines).
Your profile
You have a background in linguistics, psycholinguistics or cognitive neuroscience, with a Master’s degree on a related topic and have good skills in data science (e.g. scripting in R or Python) and statistics. Additional assets are experience with EEG (or eye-tracking), and/or experience with fieldwork on underprivileged languages. Candidates which lack one or both of these experiences are expected to have strong motivation to learn at the beginning of the PhD project.
We greatly value team science, and you are expected to have excellent communication and collaboration skills.
What we offer
You will be integrated into the Distributional Linguistics Lab at the ISLE Institute
(www.isle.uzh.ch/en/DLL.html<https://www.isle.uzh.ch/en/DLL.html>) and will work closely together with similarly-interested researchers in the NCCR.  Your dissertation work will be supervised by Professor Balthasar Bickel and Dr. Laura Giglio.
Start of employment
1 March 2026 or later
Further information
Review of applications will begin in February 2026 and continue until the position is filled.
For further information on how to apply please see https://www.isle.uzh.ch/en/jobs/phd-cross-linguistic-sentence-planning.html



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Lena Zipp

Administration

Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language Evolution (ISLE)

University of Zurich

Affolternstrasse 56

8050 Zurich

lena.zipp at uzh.ch

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