The research in CCL is inspired by and organized around a set of “core themes”. These should be seen as general working hypotheses or as research programs in the sense of the philosopher Imre Lakatos. Such a program is based on a hard core of general theoretical assumptions and cannot usually be tested in its entirety, but it can serve as the basis of more specific hypotheses and research projects. All the projects currently pursued within CCL can be seen as attempts to explore or test specific aspects of the core themes listed below together with CCL projects that relate to these core themes.

1. Internal simulation of perception and action is a fundamental mechanism for cognitive function.
   • Eye movements and mental imagery
   • The relationship between eye movements and memory
   • Cognitive architecture and Internal simulation
2. Language learning is strongly dependent on other cognitive processes.
   • Phonological Intervention For Children With Hearing Impairment (hi) With Hearing Aids Or Cochlear Implants
   • Multilingual processing
   • Localization of Verbs in the Brain
   • Modeling semantics with the aid of conceptual spaces
3. Modeling and quantifying semantic development in children is a rich resource for diagnosis and intervention.
   • Assessment of semantic linguistic maturity in children’s narratives: An application of latent semantic analysis
   • Semantic Development of Adjectives
   • Semantic memory processes in learning. Studies on children’s early word learning and category learning in adults
   • Play learning and artifacts
   • Exploring and supporting metacognitive capabilities in 3-5 year olds by means of a digital learning-game
4. The temporal coordination of speech, gaze and gestures plays an important role for interpersonal communication and learning.
   • Gaze behavior and request-response strategies in interaction between children/adolescents with hearing impairment and normally hearing peers
   • Social influences on event perception
   • The influence of speech rate and voice quality on sentence comprehension
   • Narratives and the Impact of Timing of Gestures and speech on an Addressee
   • Interplay between language and pictures in communication
   • Multimodality and timing: A Study in Audio Description
   • Keystroke logging and peer observation – tools for text creation in children’s writing
   • Speaking in Time
5. The cerebellum is critically involved in temporal aspects of motor and cognitive functions.
   • Functional data analysis of speech movements
   • Learning of timing in the cerebellum
   • Cerebellar contributions to speech production and speech perception

The core themes may appear quite disparate and it may seem arbitrary to lump them together as the basis for CCLs research. However, as will be explained below, there are important interrelations between them. To give an example, the ability of the cerebellum to time movements is tested in a conditioning experiment, where a subject learns to associate a tone with a puff of air to the eye. In a recent experiment, subjects were able to learn a conditioned blink while merely imagining (simulating) the air puffs. Thus, core themes 1 and 5 are explored in these experiments. Other experiments are testing the possibility that speech impairments are caused by a cerebellar timing deficiency, thus exploring core themes 4 and 5.