Felicia Stich

RTG PhD student, member since 2024

Project "Form–Meaning Systematicity in Early Word Learning"

Although the relationship between form and meaning in language has traditionally been assumed to be arbitrary by design (Saussure, 1916; Hockett, 1960), recent years have witnessed a resurgence of interest in iconicity as well as the systematic encoding of broader semantic or syntactic categories (Dingemanse et al., 2015). A growing host of corpus-based and experimental studies has yielded cross-linguistic evidence that systematic form–meaning mappings pervade the world's vocabularies and may play an important role in language acquisition and processing (Haslett & Cai, 2024). However, the exact nature, function, and developmental trajectory of systematicity remain poorly understood. It has been suggested that systematicity allows infants to bootstrap word meaning in early development (Imai & Kita, 2014), as part of a division of labour whereby systematicity supports category assignment whilst arbitrariness facilitates individuation and discriminability (Christiansen & Monaghan, 2016). If this is the case, systematic patterns should play a prominent role in the early lexicon before giving way to more arbitrary mappings as the vocabulary grows. However, evidence for an effect of systematicity on age of acquisition is so far limited to English (Monaghan et al., 2014; Cassani & Limacher, 2022), and previous word learning studies (e.g., Monaghan et al., 2011; Swingley et al., 2016; Sia et al., 2023) have employed artificial stimuli which did not allow infants to capitalize on natural form–meaning correspondences extracted from their existing vocabulary. My doctoral project aims to shed light on the role of systematicity in early word learning through a combination of computational and experimental approaches. For the computational part of my project, I am conducting a large-scale comparative corpus study to examine the prevalence and distribution of systematic form–meaning mappings in the early lexicon for a genetically, geographically, and typologically diverse selection of languages. I also plan to employ more exploratory methods to detect particularly systematic clusters in the lexicon. Building on the concrete patterns of regularity identified in my corpus study, I will design a series of experiments with naturalistic stimuli to investigate whether infants are sensitive to systematic mappings in their existing vocabulary and whether they can exploit them to learn novel words, using a mixture of EEG and eye-tracking techniques. Ultimately, my doctoral project will contribute to a mechanistic account of vocabulary growth in early word learning and advance our understanding of the universal principles that govern language development and the structure of the lexicon.

In addition to being a funded member of RTG 2636 Form–Meaning Mismatches, I am affiliated with the Psychology of Language Group (babylab 'Wortschatzinsel') at the Georg-Elias-Müller Institute of Psychology and an associated member of RTG 2906 Curiosity.

Research interests:

With a keen interest in experimental and computational psycholinguistics, I am passionate about exploring the structure and development of the mental lexicon, first and second language acquisition, lexical processing, prediction, and language in interaction. Over the course of my doctoral studies, I am hoping to delve deeper into natural language processing and modelling as well as the cognitive neuroscience, development, and evolution of language. I am also trained and maintain an interest in historical linguistics, language change and corpus-based research, with a particular focus on grammaticalization and the Germanic languages.

Background:

I hold a BA in English and German from the University of Bamberg with a year abroad at the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge, and an MPhil in Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics from the University of Oxford, having graduated with Distinction. My master's thesis investigated the semantic pejoration of words for women in historical corpora of German through collocational analysis. I also completed empirical research projects on prosodic phrasing in production planning, the cost of lexical prediction error, and the media discourse on gender-fair language. After graduating, I completed a research internship with the Psychology of Language Department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. I then returned to Oxford as a research assistant at Professor Aditi Lahiri's Language and Brain Laboratory where I conducted a collaborative EEG fragment priming study on phonological under specification in the processing of cognates by German-English bilinguals. My academic background has equipped me not only with a strong theoretical foundation in linguistics and philology, but also with experience in a variety of computational and experimental methods.

Additional Activities and Qualifications:

I have always been keen to engage with the scientific community and acquire transferable skills beyond my course curriculum. As an undergraduate student, I spent four years working as a student assistant to the Chairs of English and German Linguistics at the University of Bamberg where I was involved with teaching, developing an e-learning course on corpus linguistics, the collection and transcription of corpus data, and the 8th Biennial International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English 2019. Alongside my master's programme, I attended summer courses in evolutionary linguistics, statistics, cognitive neuroscience of language, and learning in children and machines at Leiden Summer School in Languages and Linguistics 2021, Birmingham Statistics for Linguists Summer School 2022, Radboud Summer School 2022, and an academy by the German Studienstiftung (London, 2022). Furthermore, I participated in the Oxford Postgraduate Conference in Linguistics of 2022 and 2023, assisted with hosting the 25th International Conference on Historical Linguistics 2022 at the University of Oxford, and served as treasurer for the graduate society of Balliol College, Oxford, managing a £50,000 budget. Prior to taking up my doctoral studies at the University of Göttingen, I obtained the Cambridge Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (CELTA), with the aim of gaining are more applied perspective on language acquisition and bilingualism. I am passionate about science communication and about equality, diversity and inclusion in academia and am looking forward to opportunities to get involved with initiatives in these areas at the University of Göttingen.

Papers :

Stich, F. 2023. Socio-cognitive factors in the pejoration of German words for women: A corpus study of semantic change. Paper presented at the Oxford Postgraduate Conference in Linguistics 2023, Oxford, 15 September 2023.

Awards :

- Katrina Hayward Prize for Best Performance in the MPhil Cohort of 2022/23, Faculty of Linguistics.

- Philology and Phonetics, University of Oxford, December 2023.

- Scholar of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, 2019–2023.

- DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Graduate Scholarship, 2020–2023.

- DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Year Abroad Scholarship, 2017–2018.