Current projects

Perspective Taking in Language (PeTaL)
With Jorrig Vogels and Emar Maier, I organized the online workshop Perspective Taking in Language on June 23-24, 2021. This workshop was held in connection with the Research Topic Perspective Taking in Language of the journal Frontiers.

The Invention of Lying: Language, Logic & Cognition
This Lorentz Center workshop, made possible by NIAS-Lorentz funding, took place on January 9-13, 2017, at the Lorenz Center@Oort in Leiden. The workshop was organized by me in collaboration with Hans van Ditmarsch (LORIA, University of Lorraine, Vandoeuvre-les-Nancy, France) and Rineke Verbrugge (Artificial Intelligence, University of Groningen).
As a follow-up of this workshop, a special issue of the journal Topics in Cognitive Science (TopiCS) appeared, on lying.

Who is lying? Left the official workshop poster and right the draft version on Hans' office door.

I am a member of the International Network on Language Abilities in Children with Autism (LACA), which was established with financial support from an NWO Internationalisation in the Humanities grant awarded to Jeannette Schaeffer (University of Amsterdam). With Jeannette, I organized the kick-off workshop of the LACA network on March 23, 2017 in Amsterdam.

Jorrig Vogels carried out his NWO Veni project "Try to see it my way: when do speakers consider the listener's perspective?" (November 2017 - July 2022) in the Semantics and Cognition group.

Emar Maier carried out his NWO Vidi project "The language of fiction and imagination" (October 2016 - October 2021) in the Semantics and Cognition group at the Faculty of Arts, as well as at the Faculty of Philosophy. Emar's Vidi team included PhD students Sofia Bimpikou and Merel Semeijn.

Jacolien van Rij carried out the first half of her NWO Veni project "Learning language from expectations" (January 2016 - January 2020) in the Semantics and Cognition group. She now is a Rosalind Franklin Fellow in the department of Artificial Intelligence at the Faculty of Science and Engineering. The project of PhD student Dorothée Hoppe at the Faculty of Arts was associated with Jacolien's Veni project.

Peter de Swart carried out his NWO Veni project "The status of hierarchies in language production and comprehension" (2009 - 2011) in the Semantics and Cognition group. He now is an Assistant Professor at the Radboud University Nijmegen.

I collaborate with Deniz Baskent (Audiology, UMCG) on children's development of speech perception, among others in the PhD project of Leanne Nagels, and with Esther Ruigendijk (Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg) on language development and processing, among others in the PhD projects of Matthias Reiner and Atty Schouwenaars. The PhD projects of Leanne Nagels and Atty Schouwenaars investigated language development and processing in children with cochlear implants.

Collaborating with Catharina Hartman (Psychiatry, UMCG), I study the language abilities of children with autism. On this topic, we supervised the completed PhD projects of Sanne Kuijper and Jessica Overweg.

I have ongoing research on semantics, pragmatics and language acquisition, some of which is carried out at the Eye Lab at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Groningen.