As part of the ‘Research Cooperation Lower Saxony – Israel’ programme, the state of Lower Saxony is funding a total of 8 projects in the humanities and social sciences, which will be carried out jointly by researchers from universities and research institutions in Lower Saxony and Israel. Two German-Israeli projects link the University of Oldenburg with partner universities in Israel.
Bilingualism and group identities – this is the focus of two new research projects at the University of Oldenburg with Israeli partner universities in the Lower Saxony-Israel Research Cooperation programme.
Prof. Dr. Esther Ruigendijk from the University of Oldenburg’s Cluster of Excellence Hearing4all and Dr. Hanin Karawani from the University of Haifa are investigating why bilingual people find it more difficult to understand speech in a noisy environment. One idea is that there is a basic neural mechanism behind this effect. In bilinguals, both languages appear to be activated even when they are talking in only one of them.
In order to test this, monolingual and bilingual test subjects in Germany and Israel will be asked to carry out language tasks, while their brain activity will be measured. The aim is to find out how bilingualism shapes brain function and how this modifies speech listening abilities.
The second project by Prof Dr Marius Sältzer from the working group Digital Social Science will test a new theory on the relationship between political parties and the social groups they represent: Do parties use communication to construct new social groups in order to attract voters?
The team from Oldenburg, Jerusalem and Amsterdam is using machine learning to analyse campaign ads, party manifestos, speeches and social media posts to look for evidence. The researchers are also working with volunteers from Germany and Israel to test how group identities can be changed through political communication.