About me

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), University of Amsterdam in the NihiL project. Before, I did my postdoc in the Department of Linguistics at the Heinrich Heine Universität in Düsseldorf and PhD in the Cognitive Semantics and Quantities project at the ILLC, University of Amsterdam. My promotor was Sonja Smets (University of Amsterdam) and my supervisors were Jakub Szymanik (University of Amsterdam, currently University of Trento) and Leendert van Maanen (Utrecht University).

In my research, I combined behavioral and electroencephalography experiments with cognitive modeling. I investigate how people draw pragmatic inferences such as scalar implicature or distributive inferences. In my PhD project, I tested how people represent and verify quantified sentences (for example ''Most of the dots are blue''). More specifically, I studied the individual differences in quantifier representations and the stability of the semantic representations over time. I also investigated the source of the so-called polarity effect, slower verification of negative (fewer than half) vs. positive (more than half) quantifiers. I used the Diffusion Decision Model to model quantifier representations and the Hidden semi-Markov Model Multivariate Pattern Analysis to discover processing stages in the verification of quantified sentences. I also tested the learnability explanation of semantic universals.