Rijksuniversiteit Groningen

Petra Hendriks; Iris Scholten (PhD student)

Hendriks is a full professor in semantics and cognition, Director of Studies of the Research Master’s Program Language and Cognition, and Head of the Eye Lab Groningen. All members of Hendriks’ lab belong to the Center of Language and Cognition Groningen. Hendriks’ expertise is on formal models of interpretation and typical and atypical language development. She was the PI of an NWO VICI project on asymmetries in grammar (2007-2014), in which typically developing children, children with an Autism Spectrum Disorder and children with ADHD were compared on linguistic measures (e.g., pronoun comprehension and production) and cognitive measures (including theory of mind). In this study and ongoing research on language and autism, she collaborates with Accare (Dr. Catharina Hartman). In addition to the NWO VICI grant, Hendriks obtained an NWO Aspasia grant, NWO Cognition grant, and several smaller grants, totalling about €2M. Hendriks has over 140 publications and published in highly ranked international journals such as PLoS ONE, Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, Topics in Cognitive Science, Journal of Child Language, Language Acquisition, Linguistics and Philosophy, and Journal of Logic, Language and Information. She is an elected member of the Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen (KHMW) since 2013, and an elected member of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen (KNAW) since 2016. Within the network, Hendriks focuses on semantic/pragmatic abilities of children with ASD from age 6 on, investigating their linguistic perspective taking abilities through a combination of offline (picture verification tasks, elicited production) and online methods (eyetracking). Topics to be investigated include pronouns, tense and quantifiers.