Maria Polinsky appointed a Mercator Fellow
We are happy to announce that, starting April 2026, NHLRC Director of Research Maria Polinsky (Professor Emerita, University of Maryland, College Park) will be a Mercator Fellow on a new project at the University of Konstanz titled Silence, Noise, and Signal in Language (SiNoSi). The research study will investigate “the role of silence and noise in our capacity for perceiving, learning and producing linguistic signals.” Professor Polinsky will be part of a larger group of Mercator Fellows that includes Prof. Rich Shivener (York University), Prof. Charles Chang (University of Pennsylvania), and Prof. Petra Wagnar (Universität Bielefeld).
The Mercator fellowship program is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) to enable an intensive and long-term exchange with scientists abroad on Collaborative Research Centres like SiNoSi.