Simone Sprenger: Research

I am a member of the Semantics and Cognition group, which is led by Petra Hendriks at the Faculty of Art, University of Groningen. I am also a member of the Center for Language and Cognition (CLCG) and the BCN research school.

PhD projects

Amélie la Roi's NWO project on language and the ageing brain(with Petra Hendriks, defended "cum laude" in May 2021).
Vera Hukker's CLCG project on the development of irony comprehension (with Petra Hendriks).
Irène Mognon's CLCG project on the development of the comprehension of scalar implicatures (with Petra Hendriks and Sanne Kuijper).

Research master projects

Matthias Reiner: EEG study on the relationship between attention and language competition (finished July 2021).
Tom Freire-Offrede: project on bilingual picture naming (finished February 2020).

Research assistants

Wessel van der Rest designed the website and experiment implementation for maakdatdekatwijs.nl.
Marco Breemhaar designed an idiom robot and the idiom database that we use for maakdatdekatwijs.nl, and has implemented the text-to-speech technology that we use for both.
Sjoerd Hekman helped us to collect the idioms for maakdatdekatwijs.nl.
Raoul Buurke was involved in the implementation of software for automatic speech onset detection (starting grant Faculty of Arts 2019).

Recent publications

Hukker, V., Sprenger, S., & Hendriks, P. (2021, May). Norm-Based Expectations Affect Children’s Understanding of Verbal Irony. In Proceedings of the 45th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 332-345).
Mognon, I., Sprenger, S., Kuijper, S., & Hendriks, P. (2021). Balancing the (Horn) scale: explaining the production-comprehension asymmetry for scalar implicatures. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 27(1), 19.
Mognon, I., Sprenger, S. A., Kuijper, S. J., & Hendriks, P. (2021). When speakers are more logical than hearers: why children show adult-like production but not adult-like comprehension of scalar items. In Experimental Methods in Language Acquisition Research.
Verbree, van Rij & Sprenger (2020). Mentale Beanspruchung beim Sprechen: Erkenntnisse aus der Pupillometrie zur flüssigen und gestotterten Sprachproduktion. In: Breitenstein, Burmester, Yetim & Fritzsche (Hrsg.). Spektrum Patholinguistik Band 12. Schwerpunktthema: Weg (e) mit dem Stottern: Therapie und Selbsthilfe für Kinder und Erwachsene. Potsdam: Universitätsverlag Potsdam.
la Roi, Sprenger & Hendriks (2020). ERPs reveal increased dependency on linguistic context due to cognitive aging. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.
Sprenger, la Roi & van Rij (2019). The development of idiom knowledge across the lifespan. Frontiers in Communication, 4, 29.

Recent presentations

Simone Sprenger, Rahel Verbree, & Jacolien van Rij: Pupil size reflects the time course of lexical access during production. Poster at AMLaP 2019, Moscow, Sept 7th.
Amélie la Roi, Simone Sprenger, & Petra Hendriks: Using idioms to study the effects of cognitive ageing on language processing: An ERP study. Talk at AMLaP 2019, Moscow, Sept 8th.

National Weekend of Science 2019

Together with Jacolien van Rij I have conducted a large-scale idiom rating study that has been publicized during the National Weekend of Science 2019 in the Netherlands. This research is supported by a grant from the Gratama foundation.