Hendriks, Prof. Petra

Petra Hendriks conducts research into meaning in language – the meaning of words and sentences. Words often have multiple meanings, which makes the number of possible meanings of sentences containing such words enormous. However, people usually don’t notice this and automatically pick the right meaning without even realising that many more meanings may have been possible. You don’t notice how many meanings a certain sentence can actually have until you start to analyse it with a computer.
Hendriks’s research focuses on the differences between language production and language comprehension. The aim is to gain more insight into human linguistic capability and how we combine our knowledge as speakers with our knowledge as listeners. Her research group systematically studies language production and language comprehension in children, adults and autistic adolescents, thus enabling an evaluation of which grammatical knowledge is needed for optimum communication.
Previously in the news

2020
2019
2018
Psycholinguistic and Computational Perspectives on Non-Compositional Meaning in Phrases, Tübingen, Germany. https://noncompworkshop.github.io/
2017
2016
2015
2014
2013
2012
2011
2010
Last modified: | 10 August 2020 2.49 p.m. |