CognitiveCanary

Applicants

Students holding, or expecting, the national university degree are eligible for admission to the PhD programme. We welcome applications from home, EU and international students.

Structure of the programme

The PhD programme is divided into distinct stages of study. Upon successful completion of each period, an accreditation certificate will be issued so it is not obligatory to complete the whole programme.

First year: PhD courses

Students undertake a taught programme of graduate-level study so as to pursue research in some aspect of Cognitive Theories. The first year involves at least 20 credits. Each module is assessed through coursework and must be passed in order to transfer to second-year level.

Second year: Research supervision

This year involves a 12-credit dissertation, in which students design and conduct a piece of individual research. Students are assigned a qualified tutor to supervise their research.

Diploma de Estudios Avanzados (DEA)

In order to gain the DEA (‘Diploma of Advanced Studies’), students will defend their dissertation at a viva voce (i.e., oral) examination.

Doctoral thesis

The last period consists of developing the research project into a whole written thesis, which will be further exposed in public at an academic act.

Tuition

Tuition will be predominantly in Spanish and/or English, although materials and obligatory readings are mainly written in English.

Registration forms

For information about pre-registration and enrolment, click here.

Accommodation

Finding accommodation in Las Palmas is not really a problem and there is a fair amount of choice. Students can either stay in University accommodation or can stay in private rented accommodation, e.g. shared apartments, bed-sits, as paying guests or with relatives.

University halls of residence: click here.

Private rented accommodation: click here.

Should you require additional information about PhD studies, application forms, deadlines and funding opportunities, please click here.

What the programme offers

• Life and study in the Canary Islands.
• Comprehensive multidisciplinary training in the study of human cognition and the mind.
• Well-defined theoretical and methodological framework.
• Students will gain a deep appreciation for the often subtle interplay between form and use
• The successful postgraduate of this program will recognize technical phenomena in language and will be familiar with a variety of theories and approaches to their analysis.
• We will explore these topics: creativity; concepts and categories; metaphor and metonymy in thought and language; deixis; speech acts; coherence and cohesion in discourse; syntax and meaning; language change; language typology; brain and language; language acquisition; psycholinguistics; social contexts of language; writing systems; the relationship between body, language, and mind; sound recognition; word formation, etc.

Other details of the programme

Objectives

• The main initial objective is to think intensively about previous knowledge and academic interests in order to reorganize it all in such a way that it may be clearly included in a theoretical and methodological framework which avoids confusion of ideas.
• From this new perspective, the postgraduate student will be given the opportunity to start an individual piece of research that might ultimately become a doctoral thesis.
• This research will be tutored by a teacher of the programme during the first period and will be included in one of the research lines offered in the second year. The current status of cognitive theories is perhaps the most widely spread through the web and permits online access to the most up-to-date papers and even doctoral theses under preparation.

Interests of cognitive theories of language

• Cognitive scientists are interested in the nature of the human mind – basically, we ask how humans think. This is a huge question, and has been addressed in one way or another by many academic fields. Cognitive Science tries to unite work from many different fields, including computer science, neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, music, and literary theory. In this course, we’ll get a basic introduction to some of the topics that are central to human cognition, such as intelligence, categorization, language, and creativity. We’ll ask what can be gained by taking an integrated, cognitive scientific approach to these topics.

Relationship between the PhD programme and the Research Group

• The main research lines of the PhD programme coincide with those of the University Official Research Group on Cognitive Poetics, whose members and contents are available at the university website (Vicerrectorado de Investigación y Desarrollo Tecnológico > Grupos de Investigación).
• The term Poetics is of vital significance as a synonym for theory or system of minds, signs, languages, communication and culture. Unlike the traditional literary sense of poetics, we propose that Cognitive Poetics is synonymous with semiotically-based cognitive system.

A new view on cognition

• The new alliance between natural and human sciences and the future of the European Space of Education and Culture have contributed to a new perspective on human cognition. This novel view on the Humanities makes us participate in their philological, ontological and epistemological contents as creative agents and processing minds of their meanings.
• Today, it is impossible to develop the richness of the Humanities without integrating the most advanced scientific progress on the human being.
• The main advantage of this programme might be its monographic nature. This condition permits specialization and avoids confusion of ideas. The programme offers the possibility to re-conceptualize our interests within the new and fresh framework of cognitive theories.

The Cognitive Paradigm

• The study units of the programme are at the basis of our training as civilized human beings. They are the earliest but also the most modern issues in the light of cognitive research.
• The cognitive paradigm can give an answer to the following questions: How do we think? How do we reason through problems? How do we use our mental resources? How do we perceive the world around us? How do we recall past experiences? How do we describe the world with language? What is fiction? Where does mathematics come from? What is scientific imagination? What is the cognitive nature of ethics or aesthetics, of political parties, of concepts and religious discourses, of mass media, of advertising language and images? How does the fundamental creativity of experience work? How do we process a sentence? How do we recall something? What is the similarity between a natural conversation and a dramatic text? What is improvisation in linguistic terms? What is narrative imagination as a cognitive process? If metaphor is not now what it was years ago, what is really metaphor? Why and for what is metaphor used by all language speakers and not only Quevedo, Bach, Winston Churchill or Charles Darwin?