Prof. Petra Hendriks elected member Academia Europaea

Prof. Petra Hendriks, professor of Semantics and Cognition at the Faculty of Arts and director of the Center for Language and Cognition Groningen (CLCG), has been elected a member of the prestigious Academia Europaea. The academy aims to promote excellent European research, advise governments and international organizations on scientific issues, and stimulate interdisciplinary and international research.

Membership of the Academia Europaea, founded in 1988, is by invitation and follows an extensive selection procedure. The academy currently has around six thousand members, including more than eighty Nobel laureates. To qualify for membership, a researcher must demonstrate scientific excellence. The academy has members from various fields, including humanities, law, economic, social and political sciences, mathematics, medicine, and the natural and technical sciences.

Linguist Petra Hendriks researches how language users understand words and sentences and the extent to which they take another person’s perspective into account. She also investigates how children learn to understand their language and what influence their cognitive skills have, for example to recognize lies or understand the ironic intention of an utterance. In several international research projects, she studies how language comprehension in Dutch differs from that in other languages. 

Petra Hendriks’ research is interdisciplinary in nature. Last year, she received an NWO grant in the round SHH Open Competition L for the project ‘Unraveling language learning in autism’. In this project, she collaborates with colleagues from three other faculties: the Faculty of Medical Sciences, the Faculty of Science and Engineering and the Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences. Together, they will conduct research on language processing by children and adolescents, both with and without autism. In doing so, the team will use language experiments, virtual reality and computational modelling.