The LeibnizDream project is a joint project of the Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (ZAS), the Humboldt University of Berlin, and the University of Milan-Bicocca. The project is inspired by the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. He was convinced that human language is the key to understanding the human mind. With the LeibnizDream project, our goal is to realize Leibniz’s dream and to prove that our thoughts determine language.
We predict that child languages are a better mirror of the human mind than adult languages. To better understand how children put their thoughts into words and how this process works in different languages, we have made it our mission to study language acquisition in more than 50 child languages across the world.
Being the first open, global research collaboration to conduct language acquisition studies, the LeibnizDream project aims at building a new model of language.
For its ambitious goals and the contribution to the study of language acquisition in infancy and adulthood, the LeibnizDream project has been selected for funding by the European Research Council (ERC).