Jury report for Prof. P. (Peter) Hagoort

Director of the F.C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging and professor of Cognitive Neurosciences, with a focus on neuroimaging at the Radboud University Nijmegen.

Professor Hagoort receives the NWO/Spinoza prize 2005 for his research into human linguistic competence and for how he has led the F.C. Donders Centre to world fame within a period of five years.

Peter Hagoort (Oudewater, 19 January 1954) studied psychology and biology at Utrecht University and experimental psychology at Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, where he gained his doctorate in 1990. In that same year he was appointed as project leader of a large research project at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, a function he fulfilled until 2003. He now leads a diverse research group in the area of the neurocognition of language. In January 1999 he became professor at the Nijmegen Institute of Cognition and Information (NICI), Radboud University Nijmegen. Hagoort is also the founder and director of the F.C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging. In 2003 the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences awarded him the Dr Hendrik Muller Prize for Behavioural and Social Sciences.

Peter Hagoort focuses on the fundamental, neurobiological aspects of human linguistic competence.

For example, he has investigated language disorders among patients with brain damage. Hagoort demonstrated that damaged brains find other routes to make language comprehension possible.

Another part of his research focuses on the brain's activity during speech. Under Hagoort's supervision, researchers devised a method that shows at which moment the brain collects information about a word. With this they demonstrated that during speech, people know the grammatical data about a noun approximately 40 milliseconds earlier than the first syllable of the word. Another 120 milliseconds have elapsed before they have formed the complete sound of the word so that they can speak it. This new approach for measuring the speech process led to a series of now classic publications in journals such as Science.

Since gaining his doctorate, Peter Hagoort has published more than 90, mostly extensive, articles and has written more than 30 chapters in books. In addition to its frequent citation in top journals, Hagoort's work has also gained an important place in psycholinguistic and cognitive neuroscience textbooks.

Hagoorts work is characterised by creativity and renewal, elegance and purity. In the F.C. Donders Centre he has brought together a strategically-planned mix of disciplines, varying from psycholinguistics to neurobiology. In its short existence this institute has acquired world fame under Hagoort's leadership.

Hagoort is widely regarded to be a top international researcher and an opinion leader in his discipline. Colleagues and PhD students praise his talent for explaining complex material in a straightforward manner. The referees expect that in the future Hagoort will throw new light on the neural basis of cognitive processes such as those of language and language processing.

Further information for the press available from:

· Prof. P. (Peter) Hagoort (F.C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging)

· t +31 (0)24 361 0648/0651, peter.hagoort@fcdonders.ru.nl

· http://www.fcdonders.ru.nl

This jury report served as the basis for the speech given by Prof. J.J. Meulman at the announcement ceremony for the NWO/Spinoza prizes 2005 on 6 June.