Vidi grants for Caspar van Lissa and Connie de Vos
After veni comes vidi, which is completely true for two Tilburg researchers. This year linguist Connie de Vos and methodologist Caspar van Lissa can add a Vidi grant to their list of achievements. The Vidi is a talent grant from NWO of up to 850 thousand euros.
Connie de Vos conducts research on non-verbal communication at the Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences. With the grant, she can spend five years researching home sign language systems. Worldwide, many deaf children grow up in a hearing world, outside the sign language community. Together with family and friends, they develop their own unique home sign systems.
De Vos will investigate these forms of communication by analysing video recordings and using social-cognitive experiments. Also, a website will be built in cooperation with deaf-led organisations for information and advice to improve communication. In addition to a Veni, De Vos has also previously won an ERC Starting Grant for research into sign languages in Bali.
Conflicting findings
Caspar van Lissa of the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences receives a Vidi to investigate how to construct better social science theories. These are often so ambiguous that they can accommodate contradictory findings. Van Lissa will investigate whether machine learning can be used to translate patterns in data into unambiguous theories. For this he will use theories about emotion regulation in adolescents.
In 2019, Van Lissa was awarded a Veni, also for research on adolescents. This involved a combination of pedagogy and machine learning to investigate which young people are at risk of emotional problems and the role parents play in this.