Senior researchers
Prof. Dr. Petra Hendriks
Petra Hendriks is the head of the Semantics and Cognition Group at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Groningen. Her research interests are in semantics, pragmatics and language acquisition. From 2007 to 2014, she led a research project on asymmetries between comprehension and production in child language, funded by a Vici grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Since 2013, she is a member of the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (KHMW). In 2016, she was elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). [website]
Dr. Simone Sprenger
Simone Sprenger is assistant professor at the Faculty of Arts. She received her PhD in experimental psychology from the University of Nijmegen’s Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics (2003) and held several post-doc positions in the US (university of Pittsburgh) and the Netherlands. She is currently studying idiom processing, bilingualism and the way in which language processing changes across the life span. Besides the CLCG, Simone is also affiliated with the Research School of Behavioral and Cognitive Neurosciences (BCN), and het Werkverband Amsterdamse Psycholinguïsten (het WAP). [website]
Dr. Emar Maier
Emar Maier is assistant professor affiliated with the Faculty of Philosophy and the Faculty of Arts, specializing in formal semantics. He received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Nijmegen (2006), held several postdoc positions, and led an ERC Starting Grant project. He is currently heading a NWO VIDI research project investigating the semantics of imagination and fiction. His research interests include narrative, quotation, indexicals, and attitudes. [website]
Dr. Atty Schouwenaars
Atty Schouwenaars is assistant professor at the Faculty of Arts. She received her PhD from the University of Oldenburg (2018), with a dissertation on the acquisition and processing of morphosyntactic information by children with normal hearing and children with cochlear implants. From 2019 until 2022 she studied speech therapy and worked with young children with developmental language disorders. She currently does eye-tracking research on sentence processing in typical and atypical populations. [website]
Junior researchers
Sofia Bimpikou, PhD student
Sofia Bimpikou obtained her bachelor’s degree in International and European Studies at the University of Macedonia in Thessaloniki, Greece, and her research master’s degree in Linguistics at the University of Utrecht. As a researcher, she is mainly interested in formal and experimental semantics and pragmatics. In her PhD project she investigates how linguistic features and the pragmatics of narrative discourse affect readers’ interpretation of narrative texts. [website]
Dorothée Hoppe, PhD student
Dorothée Hoppe came to do her PhD in Groningen with a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Cognitive Science from the University of Tübingen, Germany. Her research focus are low-level mechanisms of learning and their application to language learning. In her PhD project, she studies which properties of the learner input influence category learning in language combining computational, psycholinguistic and corpus linguistic methods. [website]
Vera Hukker, PhD student
Vera Hukker obtained her bachelor’s degree in Linguistics and her research master’s degree in Language and Cognition at the University of Groningen. As a researcher, she is particularly interested in the development of children’s semantic and pragmatic skills. In her PhD project, she investigates how social factors and cognitive factors influence children’s language understanding. [website]
Irene Mognon, PhD student
Irene Mognon obtained her B.A. degree in Humanities at the University of Bologna (Italy) and her M.A. degree in Linguistics at the University of Siena (Italy). She is keen on studying phenomena at the interface between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, especially in children and in atypical populations. Adopting an experimental approach, in her PhD project she investigates language acquisition in children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder, focusing in particular on the relationship between cognitive abilities, such as Theory of Mind, and linguistic skills. [website]
Associate researchers
Ana Bosnić, PhD student, Univeristy of Groningen and University of Nantes
Merel Semeijn, PhD student, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Groningen
Abby Toth, PhD student, Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, University of Groningen
Dr. Jorrig Vogels
Dr. Jacolien van Rij, Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Univeristy of Groningen
Dr. Jennifer Spenader, Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, University of Groningen
Prof. Dr. Deniz Baskent, Faculty of Medical Sciences, University of Groningen
Dr. Catharina Hartman, Faculty of Medical Sciences, University of Groningen
Dr. Sanne Kuijper, Faculty of Behavioral and Social Sciences, University of Groningen
Dr. Michael Ramscar, University of Tübingen
Prof. dr. Peter Paul de Deyn, Faculty of Medical Sciences, University of Groningen
Dr. Fransje Reesink, Faculty of Medical Sciences, University of Groningen