Spalek

Katharina Spalek was appointed professor for psycho- and neurolinguistics on August 1st, 2021.

Originally, her main research topic was language production, both in monolingual and bilingual speakers. In recent years, her interest has shifted to language comprehension. She investigates human language processing for different kinds of linguistic phenomena including sounds, words, phrases and narrative discourse.

She studied German linguistics and psychology in Heidelberg, Oxford and Berlin. She received a doctoral degree from the Radboud University Nijmegen in 2005. She did postdoctoral research in the USA and the United Kingdom. In 2007, she was appointed “junior professor” (assistant professor) for psycholinguistics at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. There, she was awarded the starter grant “focus alternatives in the human mind” from the European Research Council (ERC) in 2016.