Rate My Professor Petra Hendriks

Petra Hendriks is Professor of Semantics and Cognition in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Groningen. She obtained her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Groningen between 1989 and 1993. Her academic career at the university encompasses roles as Lecturer in the Department of Cognitive Science and Engineering from 1993 to 1997, Assistant Professor in the Department of Artificial Intelligence from 1997 to 2002, Associate Professor in Artificial Intelligence from 2002 to 2005 and subsequently in Linguistics and Dutch Language and Culture from 2005 to 2008, and Full Professor of Semantics and Cognition since 2008. She held visiting positions as Researcher at the University of California Los Angeles in 1992 and as Visiting Scholar at Stanford University from 2009 to 2010. As Director of the Center for Language and Cognition Groningen from 2024 to 2028, she leads research in language and cognition. She is Principal Investigator on the NWO-funded project Unraveling Language Learning in Autism from 2025 to 2030, employing language experiments, virtual reality, and computational modeling in interdisciplinary collaboration across faculties.

Hendriks' research specializes in semantics and cognition, examining how language users comprehend words and sentences through perspective-taking, how children acquire language comprehension, cognitive processes like lie detection and irony understanding, cross-linguistic variations especially in Dutch, and deviations in autism, ADHD, or hearing impairments. She integrates theoretical linguistics with psycholinguistic experimentation. With over 230 publications, her work includes recent contributions such as Are second language speakers more pragmatically tolerant? Explaining the differences in scalar implicature generation between L2 and L1 (2025), Discourse in Language in Autism (2025), and How grammatical gender supports efficient communication (2025). She has provided public expert commentary on implicit political messaging, deception, children's podcasts, and AI empathy. Her influence is recognized through memberships in the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW, 2016), Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (KHMW, 2013), and Academia Europaea (2025).