Christina Papoutsi

I am a Ph.D. student (2022-2026) working in the Psychology of Language department under the supervision of prof. Antje Meyer, dr. Vitória Piai, and dr. Elli Tourtouri. 

I study the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying word production. More specifically, my Ph.D. research focuses on the production of errors (e.g., saying dog instead of cat) and "good-enough" alternative names (e.g., saying pet instead of cat) elicited using a speeded picture naming paradigm. Throughout my Ph.D. projects, I used behavioral and electrophysiological measures to investigate: (1) whether errors and alternates arise from malfunction intrinsic to core planning processing (i.e., hasty lexical selection) or from failures in the domain-general executive control system (i.e., attentional disengagement), (2) what are the speech-level (e.g. semantic neighborhood density, word frequency) and speaker-level (e.g., linguistic knowledge, processing speed) factors that bias the selection of errors and alternates, and (3) how the self-monitoring system operates under these different types of non-optimal word production (errors vs. alternates).

Alongside my Ph.D. research, I am also involved in an interdisciplinary project for which I co-received the Levelt Innovation Award 2025. In this project, we investigate how speakers coordinate informativity in their speech and gestures in conversational settings. 

Previous education

I obtained a Bachelor's degree in English Language and Literature from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. There, I attended a number of courses in theoretical and applied linguistics, as well as English and American Literature. My curiosity about the mechanisms of language production and comprehension led me to move to the Netherlands in order to do a research Master's in Linguistics at Utrecht University. There, I discovered my passion for psycho- and neurolinguistics and completed my internship and Master’s thesis in the Language Function and Dysfunction Lab at the Donders Centre for Cognition, under the supervision of dr. Vitória Piai. My research focused on the neural mechanisms underlying word planning processes following contexts that differ in modalities (verbal vs. non verbal) and syntactic structure (structured vs. unstructured).