Simone Sprenger

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

• 07/08, 08/09: Language Modeling. Department of Artificial Intelligence, Faculty of Mathematics & Natural Sciences.
• 08/09, 09/10: The Nature, Conduct & Presentation of Psychology, mentor group. Department of Psychology, Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences.
• 08/09: Research Practicum. Department of Psychology, Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences.
• 09/10: Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Neuropsychology (together with dr. L. Tucha). Department of Psychology, Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences.
• 09/10: Supervision of four B.Sc. Thesis Projects (language processing).

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.

Papers

• Sprenger, S. A. & Van Rijn, H. (in preparation). The representation of idioms in the mental lexicon.
• Sprenger, S.A., Van Rijn, H., Niessen, M. & Van Maanen, L. (in preparation). Sound naming in Dutch.
• Sprenger, S. A., & Van Rijn, H (submitted). Why telling the time is a race against the clock: a dual route account of clock time naming.
• Kempen, G., Olsthoorn, N., & Sprenger, S. A. (under revision). Entanglement of Grammatical Encoding and Decoding: Overlapping Grammatical Processing Resources for Language Production and Comprehension.
• Sprenger, S.A., Levelt, W.J.M., & Kempen, G. (under revision). Frequencies of Fixed Expressions.
• 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., & 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.
• 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.
• Timmermans, M.P.H., Schriefers, H.J., Sprenger, S., & 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

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

Conference Presentations

• 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., & 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 (2003). Lexical access during idiom production: the superlemma theory. Talk at the psychology department, Penn State University, State College.
• Sprenger (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.