I carry out my research as a member of TiCC (www.tilburguniversity.edu/ticc). This research focuses on linguistic mental representations, more specifically on frequency-driven and context-defined representations. To what extent do we know, either explicitly or implicitly, in what contexts words and phrases typically occur? Do we make use of this knowledge when we process language? And how does this knowledge affect our interpretation and evaluation of language use and the language user? I make use of metalinguistic measures, such as familiarity judgments, as well as more indirect measures, e.g. perception of attractiveness of a text and its writer.

In my PhD-research, completed in 2010, the main research question was to what extent  implicit or explicit knowledge of morphological structure of lexical items plays a role in the mental lexicon. I looked at both the acquisition of new words and the processing of known words. Experiments to answer this question were carried out by monolingual Dutch children in primary school as well as their bilingual classmates who learn Dutch as a second language.

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I am a supervisor of PhD-students Marie Barking, Julie Han, Véronique Verhagen,  and Tess van der Zanden.