Cognitive aspects of language contact in the Balkan language area

Researcher Profile: First Stage Researcher (R1)

Application Deadline: 20 Oct 2026 - 23:59 (UTC)

Country: France

Type of Contract: Temporary

Job Status: Full-time

Hours Per Week: 35

Offer Starting Date: 1 Nov 2026

Is the job funded through the EU Research Framework Programme?: Not funded by a EU programme

Is the Job related to staff position within a Research Infrastructure?: No

Offer Description

Funded by the French National Agency (ANR), MindContact project aims to explore cognitive aspects of contact-induced language change in the Balkan peninsula. Blending psycholinguistic perspectives with contact linguistics, this project takes contact phenomena in the Balkan language area under scrutiny. The Balkans are a melting pot of grammars, where different morphosyntactic features of different languages blend due to extensive language contact. In this project, we focus on 'minoritized' language varieties including non-standard minoritized languages under contact (e.g., Romani, Pomak, Judeo-Espagnol/Ladino) and regional variants under contact (e.g., Asia Minor Greek, Rumelian Turkish). A particular concentration of the PhD candidate's research would be conducted on the following grammatical phenomena: tense/aspect, evidentiality, indefinite articles, phrase structure and word orders across one or two of the above mentioned minoritized languages spoken under dominant societal languages including South Slavic languages, Modern Standard Greek and/or Turkish. MindContact explores cognitive mechanisms of language change by investigating, cross-linguistic structural priming, codeswitching, and chunking. The PhD candidate will be responsible, under the supervision of the scientific supervisor, for building psycholinguistic experiments using behavioral, eye-movement monitoring and electrophysiological experiments and running these experiments under experimental fieldwork expeditions, analysing these data and drafting/submitting articles for publication.

Cognitive aspects of language contact in the Balkan language area

Where to apply

Website: https://emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/Doctorant/UMR7320-SECARS-001/Default.aspx

Requirements

• Research Field: Language sciences — Education Level: PhD or equivalent
• Research Field: Language sciences — Education Level: PhD or equivalent
• Research Field: Language sciences — Education Level: PhD or equivalent
• Languages: FRENCH — Level: Basic
• Research Field: Language sciences — Years of Research Experience: None
• Research Field: Language sciences » Linguistics — Years of Research Experience: None
• Research Field: Language sciences » Languages — Years of Research Experience: None

Additional Information

Additional comments

Desired Qualifications:
The PhD candidate is required to hold a master's degree with A level grades in linguistics, cognitive science, psychology or related fields with a strong background in psycholinguistic methods including behavioral response times experiments, as well as eye-movement monitoring and electrophysiological experiments, demonstrated by a completed research thesis, publications and/or comparable duration of internships in experimental labs.
The PhD candidate is expected to have an excellent command of at least one and a working command of another demographically societal Balkan language, and is preferred to be a speaker of the minoritized language under scrutiny developed in their research proposal. Candidates from the minority communities with required qualifications are encouraged to apply.
Excellent fluency in academic English is required, knowledge of French is not required but desired.

Website for additional job details: https://emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/Doctorant/UMR7320-SECARS-001/Default.aspx

Work Location(s)

• Number of offers available: 1
• Company/Institute: Bases Corpus Langage
• Country: France
• City: NICE

Contact

• City: NICE
• Website: http://www.unice.fr/bcl/