Research programmes

The Nantes Linguistics Laboratory (LLING) was established in 2004 as a Research Team (Équipe d’Accueil, EA3827) under the leadership of Hamida Demirdache. On 1 January 2016, it became a Joint Research Unit (Unité Mixte de Recherche, UMR 6310) affiliated with the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and Nantes University. The laboratory was directed by Sabrina Bendjaballah from 2016 to 2021 and has been headed by Hamida Demirdache since 1 January 2022.

LLING is dedicated to advancing our understanding of the human language faculty through the study of the representations and mechanisms underlying language production, comprehension, and perception. The laboratory’s research combines a rigorous theoretical perspective with a strong and diverse empirical foundation. Its work addresses central questions in formal linguistics and linguistic variation, drawing on novel data collected through complementary methodological approaches, including fieldwork-based research, experimental linguistics, and corpus studies. By integrating theoretical inquiry with empirical investigation, LLING contributes to the development of a comprehensive understanding of language and its variability across speakers, communities, and contexts.

The languages studied at LLING belong to genetically and typologically varied families:

  • Romance languages (Spanish, French, Gallo, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Sardinian)
  • Germanic languages (German, English, Faroese, Dutch)
  • Afroasiatic languages (Arabic, Berber, Coptic, Somali, Modern South Arabian)
  • East Asian languages (Chinese, Korean, Japanese).

LLING’s research activities cover several fields of linguistics – phonetics, phonology, prosody, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, language acquisition and psycholinguistics. Our work is currently structured around two research programmes:

  • Sound forms, which covers our research on sound patterns with a particular focus on phonetic interfaces, phonology, psycholinguistics and morphosyntax. Our activities examine the abstract, category-specific knowledge that determines the properties of sounds in language and their relationships, their articulatory and acoustic properties and their perception. Learn more

  • Structure and interpretation, which covers our research on morphosyntax, semantics, pragmatics, acquisition and multimodality. Our activities seek to determine ways of linking (morpho-) syntactical representations with construction of semantic interpretations at sentence and speech level. Learn more


Research within each of these programmes intersects various themes and therefore involves internal collaboration within the laboratory and through several national and international partnerships.

Updated on 29 July 2026.