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 ***
– October 2025: A new PhD-student, Ezgi Bașar, has started her project “Modeling Modals”, supervised by Arianna Bisazza, Yevgen Matusevich and me. In her project, Ezgi will study the acquisition of modal meanings by using computational methods.
– September 2025: The paper “Interpreting past epistemic modals in English, Dutch and French” from Anouk Dieuleveut and me was accepted by Glossa.
– September 2025: The paper “Universal quantifiers in math and late language development in school-aged children” from Angeliek van Hout and me was accepted by Nota Bene.
– June 2025: MA-student Kim den Hartog wrote a profile of my work in linguistics called ‘The vele facetten van taal(kunde)’ (“the many faces of language/linguistics”).
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