Maria Spychalska

About: 

I am currently assistant lecturer at the Institute Philosophy II, Ruhr University Bochum. 

Previously,  I was a postdoc at the Language in Interaction Consortium, Neurobiology of Language Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen. Earlier, I held a (replacement) Professorship (Vertretungsprofessur, W2) in Psycho- and Neurolinguistics at the Department of Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrück (05/20-03/21). I was also a Principal investigator in the  XPRAG.de Project: Reconsidering the epistemic step: The role of speaker’s and listener’s perspectives for the processing of quantity and temporal implicatures, affiliated with the Department of German Language and Literature I at the University of Cologne. 

On the 29th of January 2016, I have defended my PhD in Philosophy, with Summa Cum Laude, at the Ruhr University of Bochum.

My thesis: Quantifying in the Brain. Combining philosophical and neurocognitive perspectives on quantification and scalar implicatures in natural language can be found here. (Advisors: Markus Werning and Manfred Krifka)

My research lies at the interface between philosophy of language, experimental semantics & pragmatics, and psycholinguistics. I am particularly interested in pragmatic aspects of communication, communication in contexts with partial information, multi-agent scenarios, communication with AI agents, as well as interface between pragmatics and reasoning in natural language. My experiments primarily involve EEG, but I also use a combination of Virtual Reality and EEG.

Some topics I investigate include:

• Implicatures and quantifiers

• The role of mentalizing in pragmatics

• Temporal implicatures of conjunctions

• Negation

• Co-speech gestures

"Do tych, co mają tak za tak - nie za nie, Bez światło-cienia" C.K. Norwid

(To those who mean 'yes' by 'yes"---'no' by 'no', without shadows.)