IMPRS DOCTORAL DEFENCE: Christina Papoutsi

The public defence is open to all interested persons.

Unless otherwise noted, defences are held at the Aula (Senaatszaal/auditorium) of the Radboud University. A livestream is also available.

To obtain a digital/printed copy of the thesis, please get in touch with the doctoral candidate.

How do speakers select words and why are they sometimes not the ones they meant to say? 

Finding the right word usually feels effortless, yet speaking involves a complex series of cognitive steps: deciding what to say, selecting a word, retrieving its sounds, and monitoring the result. Most of the time, this process happens quickly and successfully. Under time pressure, however, the system can be pushed to its limits. We may produce an error, such as saying “dog” or “mitten” when kitten was intended, or a word that is not the one we had in mind but is an acceptable alternative, such as “cat” or “pet.” What can such deviations tell us about how we retrieve and produce words?

This dissertation investigates how speakers select and monitor words when production does not go as planned. In a series of studies, participants named pictures under time pressure, increasing the likelihood of errors and alternative responses. Combining psycho- and neurolinguistic methods, this dissertation examines why these responses arise, how the brain monitors them, and why some speakers are more likely than others to produce acceptable alternatives rather than errors.

The reported studies show that words that deviate from what the speaker intended to say do not all arise in the same way. Some are produced as quickly as the intended word, whereas others reflect a more effortful selection process. Which word is finally produced is influenced by factors including word accessibility, meaning, and the speaker's language experience. In addition, the brain monitors errors and alternate names differently over time. Overall, this dissertation shows that word production is a flexible system and that studying lexical deviations can offer important insights into how speakers select and monitor words.

Christina Papoutsi was born in Thessaloniki, Greece, in 1992. She obtained a Bachelor's degree in English Language and Literature from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 2015. Subsequently, she worked as an English teacher in Greece, Spain, and the United Kingdom. In 2021, she completed a Research Master's in Linguistics at Utrecht University. From December 2020 to July 2021, she worked as a research assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. In February 2022, she began her PhD in the Psychology of Language Department at the MPI. During her PhD, she served on the IMPRS Conference 2024 organizing committee and co-received the 2025 Levelt Innovation Award, which funded collaborative research with the Multimodal Language Department.