About the Lab
We are an interdisciplinary research group which combines work in formal semantics and pragmatics, psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics, psychology and philosophy. We do theoretical, experimental and modeling work on linguistic meaning and language use.
Currently SPA Lab participates in three main projects besides external collaborations:
Emmy Noether project on Scales in language acquisition and processing (GO 3378/1-1)
DFG funded research training group Computational Cognition
DFG funded international collaboration grant with UC Irvine, Gregory Scontras (GO 3378/4-1)
What do we study?
How do people infer meanings that go beyond what is literally encoded? What are the involved linguistic, pragmatic and cognitive mechanisms and how do children acquire language, meaning and concepts? At SPA Lab, we address these questions using a variety of experimental techniques as well as theoretical and computational modeling tools. We work with adults, children, clinical populations and data from corpora (e.g., negotiation situations). The topics we work on include but are not limited to the following: pragmatic inferences, irony, politeness, adjective meaning, scales, degrees, numerals, negation, modality, information structure, miscommunication and dialog.
Which research methods do we use?
Web-based experiments (PCIBex)
Behavioral experiments with children in the lab/kindergarten
(Interactive) Eyetracking
EEG
Computational modeling (e.g. Rational Speech Act modeling, multi-agent modeling)
Formal semantcis and pragmatics
Team members
For more information about our team, please visit our lab website
Lab head
Prof. Dr. Nicole Gotzner
Personal assistant
Julia Reuter
Postdocs
Dr. Morwenna Hoeks
Dr. Elli Tourtouri
PhD students
Charlotte Uhlemann
Kristina Kobrock
Florian Mehlhase (University of Potsdam, primary advisor: Prof. Dr. Uta Herbst)
Moritz Hartstang (primary advisor: Prof. Dr. Sebastian Musslick)
Lab manager
Zeynep Bolluk
Research assistants
Ilva Hovemann
Daria Ilyuchik
Hannes Düe
SPA Alumni
Dr. Radim Lacina, now assistant professor at Masaryk University
Dr. Stavroula Alexandropoulou, now postdoc at UCL
Dr. Chao Sun, now assistant professor at Beijing University
Ella Markham, now PhD student at Edinburgh University
Henrik Discher, now PhD student at Freie Universität Berlin
Marisha Herb, now PhD student at the Berlin school of Mind and Brain
Veronika Hentze, now Master's student at University of Potsdam
Berit Reise, now PhD student at Vienna University
Maria Stella Villa Avilla, now PhD student at University of Freiburg
Elisa Percolla, now PhD student at Würzburg University
Felix Japtok
Group photo 2022 (c) Simone Reukauf
