This is Us!

Prof. Dr. Nicole Gotzner

Head of the Lab

 email

I study the linguistic, pragmatic and cognitive mechanisms underlying meaning construction and inference making. My work uses a multidisciplinary approach ranging from theoretical investigations to experimental paradigms, modeling approaches and applied corpus studies, for example in the area of negotiation. In recent years, I have been particularly interested in vague language use, polite communication and how groups form communicative strategies. 

Julia Reuter is responsible for all administrative tasks within the workgroup.

Secretary

 email

 email

Morwenna is a postdoctoral researcher in the SPA lab, and she is interested in the way people construct meaning from linguistic structure in real time. To get at this, she works in both theoretical semantics/pragmatics as well as psycholinguistics. A large proportion of her work revolves around the notion of alternatives (things that speakers could have said out loud but didn't) and their connection to the formation of questions, the interpretation of (free choice) disjunction, focus structure, intonation and the organization of discourse more generally. Before joining the SPA lab, she completed a PhD at the University of California Santa Cruz, where she wrote a dissertation on the processing of focus and the incremental construction of alternative sets. She also has ongoing projects on the interpretation and processing of anaphora, filler-gap dependencies, contrastive topics, and scope.

Dr. Elli Tourtouri (language processing and production, information theory, EEG, eyetracking, interactive experiments)

 email

 email

Moritz explores how large language models process meaning and context, combining psycholinguistic theory with computational modeling. Supervised by Sebastian Musslick and Nicole Gotzner, he conducts his research jointly at the SPA Lab and the Automated Scientific Discovery of Mind and Brain Lab. His work investigates how mechanisms in large language models can be interpreted as predictors of human text comprehension. He develops interpretable metrics to measure and personalize the comprehensibility of scientific and medical texts, connecting the SPA Lab’s work on semantics and pragmatics with applications in explainable AI and health communication.

The question that fascinates me is: “How does language support higher-level cognition?”. The starting point of my research is that language is not only a tool for communication but also plays a crucial role in cognitive processes such as perception and categorization (e.g., Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) but also higher-level cognitive abilities like reasoning (e.g., when using inner speech or in social interaction).

 email

Florian is working on the role of discourse particles in negotiation situations. He is combining insights from linguistics and negotiation research to study discourse management and its effects on negotiation outcomes in corpora.

Charlotte is working on the acquisition of the semantics and pragmatics of adjectives. She is associated with the Emmy Noether Project on "Scales in language processing and acquisition".

 email

Dr. Radim Lacina, now Assistant Professor at Masaryk University

Dr. Stavroula Alexandropoulou, now lecturer at Thessaloniki University

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