I am an Assistant Professor in Linguistics at Groningen University. I am affiliated both with the Department of Dutch Language and Culture and the Department of Linguistics. I obtained my PhD in the Linguistics Department at the University of Maryland, College Park and I was previously a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
*** News ***
– August 2026: Paper by Ezgi Bașar, Yevgen Matusevych, Arianna Bisazza and me is accepted for publication in the Findings of EMNLP on the abilities of LLMs to distinguish modal senses.
– June 2026: Angeliek van Hout and I received an NWO-L grant to study language in math education at primary schools. The project will start in February 2027, and will fund 2 PhD-projects. More information will follow soon!
– February 2026: Angeliek van Hout and I will present the poster ‘Universal quantification in math education and late language development’ at the TOK-day (Language Development in Children), Leuven.
I’m interested in the link between language and cognition. I hereby take an interdisciplinary approach and always look for ways to incorporate my research for computer scientists, or educators, for instance. From 2022-2023 I worked on societal impact more generally within the Gravity Consortium Language in Interaction.
My research focuses on modals: items like may and can, which are used to talk about possibilities and necessities that are not necessarily true at the moment (“There may be a monster under my bed!”). We use these items frequently and with variable uses – but how? And how do children acquire language that goes beyond the here and now?
Contact information
E-mail: a.m.f.van.dooren[at]rug.nl