The Cognitive Science and Language programme has been offered by several Catalan universities since the academic year 1988-89. It was initiated by professors of the Universitat de Barcelona, the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, who, while working on different fields in Cognitive Science, had the opportunity to interact profitably in different ways, and regarded such interactions important for their successfully pursuing and their particular research interests.

The program is motivated by the need of interaction among different fields in Cognitive Science, specifically, on various aspects of natural language, on issues such as its computational processing, its psychological and neurological underpinnings, its grammar and its philosophy.