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 ***
– 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.
– 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.
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