Felicia Stich

RTG PhD student, member since 2024

PhD Project ‘Form—Meaning Systematicity in Early Word Learning’

My research explores how systematic mappings between form and meaning in the lexicon may aid children in scaffolding their word learning in early development. Specifically, I am investigating how much regularity in the mapping between form and meaning is attested in the early lexicon across languages, whether words with more systematic form-meaning pairings are acquired earlier in development, and whether words are easier to learn when they overlap in form and meaning with many other words. I am approaching these questions from a corpus-based as well as an experimental perspective to gain insights into the role of form-meaning systematicity in long-term vocabulary development and in real-time word learning. Ultimately, my project will contribute to a mechanistic account of early vocabulary growth 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, I am an associate member of RTG 2906 Curiosity and affiliated with the Psychology of Language Group at the Georg-Elias-Müller Institute of Psychology as well as the interdisciplinary doctoral programme Behavior and Cognition (PhD).

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 German words for women through collocational analysis of historical corpus data. 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 the phonological processing of cognates by German-English bilinguals. Just 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) to gain a more applied perspective on second language acquisition and multilingualism.

Additional Activities

Since the start of my PhD, I have had the opportunity to visit the LOT Winter School in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, and the 8th Summer School of the Institute for Language, Communication and Brain (ILCB) in Marseille, France. In March 2026, I spent a month as a visiting researcher with Professor Michael Vitevitch’s Spoken Language Lab at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, KS, USA.

Besides my research, I have been responsible for coordinating RTG 2636’s contributions to Göttingen’s Night of Science 2025, a university-wide public outreach event. Together with RTG 2906, I have been involved with organizing the Curiosity Summer School 2026. I am also currently serving as a doctoral student representative for RTG 2636 and Behavior and Cognition (PhD).

Teaching

• Neurocognition of Language (M.Sc. Psychology), lecture/seminar, winter 2026/27 (co-taught)
• Introduction to Psycholinguistics (B.A. English / M.A. Linguistics), seminar, winter 2025/26
• Research Skills (B.Sc. Psychology), summer 2025 (co-taught)
• Neurocognition of Language (M.Sc. Psychology), summer 2025 (co-taught; lectures on Bilingualism and Language & Gender)

Supervision

• Caroline Scheller (B.A. English / B.Sc. Psychology), winter 2026/27
• Inga Hünermund (B.Sc. Psychology), winter 2026/27
• Jette Ohrdorf (B.A. Linguistics), summer 2026: ‘The effect of word systematicity and frequency on language acquisition: An analysis of Norwegian CDI data’

Publications

• Booth, J., Stich, F., Fritz, I., & Lahiri, A. (2026). Through ‘dick’ & ‘dünn’: Cognates and the legacy of diachronic change in synchronic processing. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 41(7), 972–996.
• Kalinowski, J.*, Stich, F.*, & Mani, N. (2025). Modeling the impact of phonological and semantic connectivity on early vocabulary growth. IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL) 2025 (pp. 1–6), Prague, Czech Republic. *joint first authors

Posters, Presentations, and Invited Talks

• Stich, F. & Mani, N. (2026). Detecting form-meaning systematicity in the early lexicon: A cross-linguistic evaluation of phonological and semantic distance metrics. Paper presented at the 59th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE), Osnabrück, Germany, 26–29 August 2026
• Stich, F. & Mani, N. (2026). Detecting systematic patterns in early vocabulary structure: Do similar word forms cue similar word meanings across the world’s languages? Paper presented at the 25th International Conference on Infant Studies (ICIS), Panama City, Panama, 6–9 July 2026.
• Stich, F. (2026). Learnability and early vocabulary structure. Invited talk held at the Kansas University Linguistics Colloquy, Lawrence, KS, 12 March 2026.
• Stich, F. & Mani, N. (2026). Form-meaning systematicity in the early lexicon: A cross-linguistic corpus study. Poster presented at the 48th Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS), Trier, Germany, 25–27 February 2026.
• Stich, F. & Mani, N. (2026). Detecting form-meaning systematicity in the early lexicon: A cross-linguistic corpus study. Poster presented at the Collaborative (M)GK Workshop: Negation Meets Form-Meaning Mismatches, Frankfurt (Main), Germany, 22–23 January 2026.
• Stich, F. & Mani, N. (2025). Systematicity in the early lexicon across languages: Do similar word forms cue similar word meanings? Poster presented at the 1st Workshop on Questions in Language Acquisition and Processing (Q-LAP), Mannheim, Germany, 4–5 December 2025.
• Kalinowski, J., Stich, F.,* & Mani, N. (2025). Modeling the impact of phonological and semantic connectivity on early vocabulary growth. Poster presented at the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL), Prague, Czech Republic, 16–19 September 2025. *presenter
• Booth, J., Stich, F., Fritz, I., & Lahiri, A. (2025). Through dick & dünn: Cognates and the legacy of diachronic change in synchronic processing. Poster presented at the 6th Phonetics and Phonology in Europe (PaPE), Palma de Mallorca, Spain, 25–27 June 2025.
• Stich, F. & Mani, N. (2025). The systematicity of early mappings: Do similar forms cue similar meanings across the world’s languages? Poster presented at the 7th Workshop on Infant Language Development (WILD), San Sebastian, Spain, 4–6 June 2025.
• Booth, J., Stich, F., Fritz, I., & Lahiri, A. (2025). Through dick & dünn: Cognates and the legacy of diachronic change in synchronic processing. Paper presented at the 31st Manchester Phonology Meeting (MFM), Manchester, UK, 29–31 May 2025.
• 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 (LingO) 2023, Oxford, UK, 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.