Felicia Stich
I joined the Psychology of Language Group at the Georg-Elias-Müller Institute of Psychology as a PhD student in September 2024. I am part of RTG 2636 Form-Meaning Mismatches, hosted by Linguistics in Göttingen, and an associate member of RTG 2906 Curiosity. I am also enrolled in the interdisciplinary doctoral programme Behavior and Cognition (PhD). My research is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
PhD Project
My research explores how systematic mappings between form and meaning in the lexicon may aid children in bootstrapping their word learning early in 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 research 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.
My project is supervised by Prof Dr Nivedita Mani (Psychology of Language Group, Georg-Elias-Müller Institute of Psychology), Prof Dr Markus Steinbach (Department of German Philology and Sign Lab Göttingen), and Prof Dr Lisa Beinborn (Human-Centered Data Science Group, Institute of Computer Science).
Research Interests
With a keen interest in psycholinguistics and language development, I am passionate about exploring the structure and growth of the mental lexicon, lexical storage and processing, first and second language acquisition, 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 cognitive neuroscience and developmental science. I am also trained and maintain an interest in historical linguistics and language change, with a 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
I had the opportunity to present my work at the 7th Workshop on Infant Language Development (WILD) in San Sebastián, Spain, and at the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL) in Prague, Czechia.
In June 2025, I coordinated RTG 2636’s contributions to Göttingen’s Night of Science, a university-wide public outreach event. I have also been serving as the student representative for my doctoral programme, Behavior and Cognition (PhD) since the summer semester of 2025.
Publications and Presentations
Kalinowski, J. A. F.*, Stich, F.*, & Mani, N. (to appear). Modeling the impact of phonological and semantic connectivity on early vocabulary growth. IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning 2025, Prague, Czech Republic. *joint first authors
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 2025, 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 2025, 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 2023, Oxford, UK, 15 September 2023.