Pia Knoeferle

Prof. Dr. Pia Knoeferle is a leading academic at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she serves as a Professor in the Department of German Language and Linguistics. She is a principal investigator in the Collaborative Research Center (CRC 1412) focused on register phenomena and leads the Reaction Time, Eye-tracking, and EEG Laboratories. Her research spans psycholinguistics, cognitive neuroscience, and computational modeling of language, with a central interest in how real-time language comprehension interacts with social context, formality-register congruence, and morphosyntactic processing.

• Appointments: Professor at Humboldt-Universität (2024), CRC 1412 member
• Methodologies: Eye-tracking, EEG, Visual World Paradigm, ERP

Her work investigates lifespan language processing (children, adults, older adults) through contextual cue integration, including emotional, spatial, and social context such as gender cues, eye gaze, and facial expressions. Key questions include: How do pragmatic and contextual factors modulate lexical and grammatical processing? What representations underlie register sensitivity in spoken and written comprehension?

Recent articles (2022-2024) focus on register congruence effects in German sentence processing, age-related differences in formality-register anticipation, and interactions between register and morphosyntactic knowledge. Using eye-tracking and visual world paradigms, her team examines incremental integration of socially-situated context with verb-argument relations and grammatical constraints. Findings suggest subtle late-stage register effects and interference between pragmatic and syntactic processing.

Her lab collaborates with researchers like Katja Maquate, Valentina Nicole Pescuma, and Camilo Ronderos, contributing to the Frame text of the Second Phase Proposal for CRC 1412 (2020) and subsequent reviews in Frontiers in Psychology (2023). The work emphasizes complementary methods to model register variability across languages, modalities, and cultural contexts.