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.
How do we do our research?
We use different (experimental) techniques, including the following:
Web-based experiments (PCIBex)
Behavioral experiments with children in the lab
Eyetracking
EEG
Computational modeling (e.g. Rational Speech Act modeling, multi-agent modeling)
Team members
For more information about our team, please visit our lab website
Lab head
Prof. Dr. Nicole Gotzner
Personal assistant
tba
Postdocs
Dr. Morwenna Hoeks
Dr. Elli Tourtouri
PhD students
Radim Lacina
Kristina Kobrock
Florian Mehlhase (University of Potsdam, primary advisor: Prof. Uta Herbst)
Lab managers
Zeynep Bolluk
Elisa Percolla
Research assistants
Charlotte Uhlemann
Maria Stella Vila Avilla
Berit Reise
Daria Ilyuchik
Ilva Hovemann
Felix Japtok
Tutors
Regilla Bastian
Sila Selvi Capar
SPA Alumni
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 Master's student at University of Potsdam
Veronika Hentze, now Master's student at University of Potsdam
Group photo 2022 (c) Simone Reukauf
