Jennifer Spenader

My name is Jennifer Spenader and I am Assistant Professor (tenured) in Language and Cognition at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence at the University of Groningen in the north of the Netherlands.

Most of my research is within the fields of experimental semantics and pragmatics. My current research focuses on quantification, looking at how quantifiers are acquired and processed, at how distributivity is marked and interpreted and how preferences for distributive or collective interpretations develop. I've also worked quite a bit on pragmatic influences on pronoun interpretation as well as other semantic topics (NPIs, implicit causality) and pragmatic topics (presuppositions, abstract objects, verb-phrase ellipsis).

I stongly believe we can extend our theoretical understanding of linguistic phenomena by empirical investigation. I regularly use both corpus and psycholinguistic experiments to study semantic and pragmatic problems, and in several instance have combined the two to really investigate a problem from all perspectives.

I have a number of recent papers on quantification, currently a major interest of mine. This includes a recent training study where we attempted to train children not to make spreading errors with universal quantifiers (Spenader & Roest, 2019), recent work on the interpretation of distributive share markers in Serbian (Bosnic & Spenader, 2019), experimental work on a potential explanation for spreading errors (de Koster, Spenader, & Hendriks 2018) and work looking at how childrens acquisition of distributive preferences with adjectives of comparison develop (De Koster, Spenader & Dotlacil, 2017).

At the upcoming BUCLD conference I will be giving a talk about the relationship between spreading errors with universal quantifiers relate to children's errors in interpreting the adverbial quantifier only (Spenader, De Koster, Hollebrandse & Hendriks. I will also be presenting two posters, one on how different event types influence distributivity preferences (De Koster, Spenader & Hendriks) and one on children's ability to learn novel quantifiers with non-standard features (De Villiers & Spenader) Extended versions of some of this work are currently under review as journal papers.

Other recent work on distributivity preferences has been presented at Amlap (Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing, 2018) and GALA (Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition, 2019).

I've also work quite a bit on other topics, in particular experimental investigations of childrens interpretations of pronouns and reflexives (Hendriks & Spenader 2005/2006; Spenader, Smits & Hendriks, 2009.). I've also been involved in numerous recent projects looking at the influence of event-based biases on pronoun interpretation (Spenader & Sprenger 2011, TIN and Tabu-dag), DETECT-2013 (Spenader 2013) and ESSLLI-2013 (Spenader 2013). Together with Prof. Dr. Johan Bos, I created the first annotated corpus of VP-ellipsis (Bos & Spenader 2011), available online for other researchers. I also have a strong background in smaller corpus investigations, for example carrying out the first corpus study of presupposition triggers (Spenader 2002) as well as the first investigation of abstract object anaphora (Spenader 2001) and I have also combined corpus investigations with controlled experimentation to investigate resulative connectives (Andersson & Spenader, 2014).