Simone Sprenger

My work
Teaching
Publications
Misc

I am currently working as a researcher at the University of Groningen (Faculty of Arts, Department of English Linguistics) where I am part of the "Bilingualism in Groningen" project (PI prof. Monika Schmid). In addition, I am a coordinator of the research master and the Graduate School of Behavioural and Social Sciences.

Research interests

Effects of online and offline processing during idiom comprehension
Effects of idiomaticity on the structure of the mental lexicon
Bilingual language processing
Sentence processing
Effects of noise on listening effort

Idiom Processing

Idiomatic expressions such as she has her head in the clouds have been intriguing linguistic researchers for decades. However, while sometimes defying the rules of syntax, and almost always defying the rules of literal compositionality, they seem to pose more problems for researchers than they do for speakers. Given sufficient context, native speakers have been shown to be faster at processing idioms than at processing normal, compositional phrases. Even if such effects might not generalize to idiom processing per se, they do indicate that somehow idiomatic expressions have left their mark on the mental lexicon. At the very least, speakers seem to be naturally equipped with a language processing system that smoothly integrates literal and non-literal language use. This assumption is reflected in most quantitative models of idiom processing.

In the model that I developed in collaboration with Gerard Kempen and Willem Levelt (Sprenger, Kempen & Levelt, 2006), word representations and idiom representations are tightly interwoven. In my research on idiom processing, I strive towards a model of idiom representation and processing that captures the idiosyncrasies of figurative language within the constraints of what we know about non-figurative language processing, memory representations, and general cognitive processes.

University of Groningen

08/09, 09/10, 10/11, 11/12: The Nature, Conduct & Presentation of Psychology Department of Psychology, Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences.
08/09, 9/10, 10/11, 11/12: Research Practicum. Department of Psychology, Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences.
09/10, 10/11, 10/11, 11/12: Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Neuropsychology (cognitive psychology part). Department of Psychology, Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences.
09/10, 11/12: Supervision of B.Sc. thesis projects.
10/11: Supervision of M. Sc. project.
07/08, 08/09: Language Modeling. Department of Artificial Intelligence, Faculty of Mathematics & Natural Sciences.

Radboud University, Nijmegen

04/05, 05/06, 06/07: Psycholinguistics. Department of Dutch, Faculty of Arts.

Grants & Scholarships

2003-2004 TALENT grant (NWO)
2002 Grant from the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds for six weeks of research at the University of Pittsburgh.
1997-1999 Scholarship from the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes (German National Academic Foundation).
1995-1996 Erasmus scholarship, European Union.

Grant Opportunities for Students

Studienkolleg zu Berlin: for more information, click on the logo, or download the flyer in German or English.

Papers

Van Rijn, H., Dalenberg, J., Borst, J. & Sprenger, S. A. (submitted). Memory strength correlates negatively with pupil dilation in a delayed paired-associate task.
Sprenger, S. A., & Van Rijn, H (submitted). It’s Time to Do the Math - Computation and Retrieval in Clock-Time Naming.
Timmermans, M.P.H., Schriefers, H.J., Sprenger, S. A., & Dijkstra, A.F.J. (2012). Describing Simple Events: The Dynamics of Incremental Grammatical Encoding. Journal of Cognitive Psychology. DOI:10.1080/20445911.2011.649254. (available online)
Kempen, G.A.M., Olsthoorn, N.M. & Sprenger, S. (2011). Grammatical workspace sharing during language production and language comprehension: evidence from grammatical multitasking. Language and Cognitive Processes. (available online). See also the short summary on the MPI homepage.
Kuiper, K., Van Egmond, M. E., Kempen, G., & Sprenger, S. A. (2007). Slipping on superlemmas: Multiword lexical items in speech production. The Mental Lexicon, 2, 313-357.
Sprenger, S.A., Levelt, W.J.M., & Kempen, G. (2006). Lexical access during the production of idiomatic phrases. Journal of Memory and Language, 54 (2), 161–184.
Sprenger, S.A. (2006). Aspekte der Sprachproduktion. Tätigkeitsbericht des Arbeitsbereichs Sprachproduktion des Max Planck Instituts für Psycholinguistik. In Jahrbuch der Max Planck Gesellschaft 2006.
Sprenger, S. A., & Van Rijn, H. (2005). Clock time naming: Complexities of a simple task. In B. Bara, L. Barsalou, & M. Bucciarelli (Eds.), Proceedings of the 27th annual conference of the cognitive science society (CogSci 2005) (pp. 2062–2067). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Timmermans, M.P.H., Schriefers, H.J., Sprenger, S. A. , & Dijkstra, A.F.J. (1999). Incremental grammatical encoding in event descriptions. In M. Hahn & S. C. Stoness (Eds.), Proceedings of the 21st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 1999) (pp. 736-741). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

PhD Thesis

Sprenger, S.A. (2003). Fixed expressions and the production of idioms. Ph.D. dissertation. U. Nijmegen. MPI Series in Psycholinguistics, 21. Supervisors: W.J.M. Levelt and G. Kempen

MA Thesis

Sprenger, S.A. (1999). Experimental studies on incremental grammatical encoding in sentence production, M.A. thesis. Supervisors: H. Schriefers, A. Dijkstra, Nijmegen Institute for Cognition and Information (NICI).

Conference Presentations

Spenader, J.K. and Sprenger, S.A. (2011). Does Contrastive Marking Reverse Pronominal Antecedent Biases for Implicit Causality Verbs? Paper presented at TABU, annual meeting of the Bulletin voor Taalwetenschap, 2011, Groningen.
Spenader, J. and Sprenger, S.A. (2011). Does Contrastive Marking Reverse Pronominal Antecedent Preferences for Source-Goal Verbs? Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Algemene Vereniging voor Taalwetenschap, TIN 2011, Utrecht.
Sprenger, S.A. & Van Rijn, H. (2010) The representation of idiom words in the mental lexicon. In S. Ohlsson & R. Catrambone (Eds.), Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (p. 522). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
Sprenger, S.A. & van Rijn, H. (2009). The representation of idioms in the mental lexicon. Paper presented at 12th winter congress of the Dutch Society for Psychonomics. Egmond aan Zee, The Netherlands.
Kempen, G., Olsthoorn, N., & Sprenger, S.A. (2009). Entanglement of grammatical encoding and decoding: Overlapping grammatical processing resources for language production and comprehension. 2009 CUNY Conference on Sentence Processing. Davis, Ca.
Kempen, G. & Sprenger, S.A. (2008). Monotropism within and across Grammatical Encoding and Grammatical Decoding: Evidence for deep entanglement of Encoder and Decoder. Poster presented at the Workshop on Natural Language Production. Annapolis, MA.
Van Rijn, H., & Sprenger, S.A. (2007). Producing time. Paper presented at the Second European Cognitive Science Conference. Delphi, Greece.
Sprenger, S.A. , & Van Rijn, H. (2005). Clock time naming: Complexities of a simple task. Paper presented at the 14th meeting of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (ESCOP-2005). Leiden, The Netherlands.
Sprenger, S.A. , & Van Rijn, H. (2005). Clock time naming: Complexities of a simple task. Poster presented at the Fourth Annual Summer Interdisciplinary Conference (ASIC-2005). Briançon, France.
Sprenger, S.A. & Van Rijn, H. (2005). Clock time naming: Complexities of a simple task. Poster presented at the 27th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci-2005). Stresa, Italy.
Sprenger, S.A. , Kempen, G., Levelt, W.J.M. & Rijn, H. van (2002). A frequency count of fixed expressions in Dutch. Poster presented at the 13th Meeting of the European Society of Cognitive Psychology (ESCOP-2003). Granada, Spain.
Sprenger, S.A. , Levelt, W.J.M., & Kempen, G. (2001). The activity of literal word meaning during the production of idioms. Poster presented at the 7th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP-2001). Saarbrücken, Germany.
Sprenger, S.A. , Levelt, W.J.M., & Kempen, G. (2001). Tracking the time course of literal word meanings during the production of idioms. Paper presented at the XIIth Conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (ESCOP-2001). Edinburgh, Scotland.
Sprenger, S.A. , Levelt, W.J.M., & Kempen, G. (2001). The production of fixed expressions. Paper presented at the 1st BPS Exeter-Birmingham Language Production Workshop: Sentence Production. Birmingham, UK.
Sprenger, S.A. , Levelt, W.J.M., & Kempen, G. (2000). Produktion idiomatischer Ausdrücke: Idiom Repräsentation und lexikaler Zugriff [The production of fixed expressions: Idiom representation and access]. Paper presented at the 42. Tagung experimentell arbeitender Psychologen (TeaP-2000) [42nd Meeting of experimental psychologists]. Braunschweig, Germany.
Sprenger, S.A. , Levelt, W.J.M., & Kempen, G. (2000). The production of fixed expressions: Idiom representation and access. Paper presented at 13th Annual CUNY Sentence Processing Conference. La Jolla, CA, USA.
Sprenger, S.A. , Levelt, W.J.M., & Kempen, G. (1999). Producing idiomatic expressions: Idiom representation and access. Poster presented at 7e Wintercongres van de Nederlandse Vereniging voor Psychonomie [7th winter congress of the Dutch Society for Psychonomics]. Egmond aan Zee, The Netherlands.
Sprenger, S.A. , Levelt, W.J.M., & Kempen, G. (1999). Producing idiomatic expressions: Idiom representation and access. Poster presented at 5th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP-1999). Edinburgh, Scotland.
Timmermans, M.P.H., Schriefers, H.J., Sprenger, S.A. , & Dijkstra, A.F.J. (1999). Describing simple events: Experiments on incremental grammatical encoding. Poster presented at the 11th Congress of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (ESCOP-1999). Gent, Belgium.

Invited Talks

Sprenger, S.A. & Van Rijn, H. (2011). Idiom word priming in visual word recognition. Paper presented at 9th Sino-German Workshop on Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology, organized by the Department of Psychology (Peking University) and the Human Science Center (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München). Beijing, China.
Van Rijn, H., & Sprenger, S.A. (2007). Producing time. Invited paper presented at the Second European Cognitive Science Conference. Delphi, Greece.
Sprenger, S.A. (2003). Lexical access during idiom production: the superlemma theory. Talk at the psychology department, Penn State University, State College.
Sprenger, S.A. (2003). Lexical access during idiom production: the superlemma theory. Talk presented at the workshop "Collocations and idioms 2003: linguistic, computational, and psycholinguistic perspectives", Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin.