Maria Spychalska

From 1st September 2022,  I am a postdoc at the Language in Interaction Consortium, Neurobiology of Language Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen. 

Between May 2020 and March 2021, I will serve as a (replacement) Professor (Vertretungsprofessur, W2) in Psycho- and Neurolinguistics at the Department of Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrück. 

I am 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

I am affiliated with the Department of German Language and Literature I at the University of Cologne. I am also (externally) involved in the research of the Language and Cognition group, Institute of Philosophy II, Ruhr University of Bochum.

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.

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 worked on include:

• Scalar implicatures

• Semantics and pragmatics of bare and modified numerals

• Temporal implicatures of conjunctive sentences

• Negation

My PhD advisers were Markus Werning and Manfred Krifka. Previously  worked with Marcin Mostowski & Joanna Odrowaz-Sypniewska, who were my advisers in Warsaw, and Michiel van Lambalgen who was the supervisor of my Master in Logic thesis in Amsterdam.

I am also involved in two short-term collaboration projects within the XPRAG.de network:

• (NEW COLLABORATION PROJECT!) Combining EEG and virtual reality to investigate the processing of quantifiers and scalar implicatures in the context of partial information (with David Peeters, MPI, Nijmegen)

• Implicature processing in high-functioning autism (with Petra Schumacher, Kai Vogeley and Markus Werning).

• Self-paced graph reading and the complexity of embedded implicatures (with Anton Benz)

"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.)