Dr. Asya Achimova

Email: asya.achimovaspam prevention@uni-tuebingen.de

Phone: (07071) 29-73953

Office Hours: by appointment

Keplerstr. 2, Rm. 286, 72074 Tübingen.

Biographical information

• 2002 – 2007 Undergraduate studies at Perm State University, Department of Philology. Diploma in English Language and Literature
• 2008 – 2014  Ph.D. program in Cognitive Psychology at Rutgers University, New Jersey.
• 2014 Ph.D. in Psychology, Dissertation advisors: Julien Musolino and Viviane Déprez
• 2015 – 2016 Part-time lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Leipzig
• 2016 – 2018 Visiting scholar at Wayne State University, Detroit
• 2018 – 2023 Post-doc in Graduate School “Ambiguity – Production and Perception” at the University of Tübingen
• 2023 – 2024 Substitute Professor of Cognitive Modeling, Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrück
• 2024 – present Emmy Noether group leader "Socially-relevant pragmatic inference"

Find Dr. Achimova's full CV (as a PDF) behind this link.

Personal website

Research interests

Asya Achimova is working on modeling ambiguity resolution as pragmatic inference within the Rational Speech Act framework (Frank & Goodman, 2012). Ambiguity is often considered to be an unfortunate side-effect of communication that hinders information exchange. However, interlocutors not only employ efficient strategies to resolve ambiguities, but they can also choose to remain ambiguous to watch how their partners interpret ambiguous phrases. Speakers can then reason about which prior beliefs led the listener to a particular reading of an ambiguous phrase. Conversation partners are able to gain deeper understanding of each other’s beliefs and perspectives without explicitly asking about them. RSA framework gives us mathematical tools to model the process of pragmatic reasoning.

Recent publications

Dissertation

• Fröhlich, M., Jäger, G., & A. Achimova. Rethinking Ambiguity Across Species. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 179. open access
• Achimova, A., Franke, M, and M.V. Butz. (2025). The alignment model of indirect communication. open access
• Butz, M. V., Mittenbühler, M., Schwöbel, S., Achimova, A., Gumbsch, C., Otte, S., & S. Kiebel (2024). Contextualizing predictive minds. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 168, 105948. open access
• Achimova, A., Ebert-Rohleder, M., Geiger, L., Klenk, J., Reid, M., Vollstedt, T., Zirker, A. (2024). Ambiguity in Discourse: The Tübingen Interdisciplinary Corpus of Ambiguity Phenomena. In Ilaria Fiorentini, I. & Zanchi, C. (Eds.) Vagueness, ambiguity, and all the rest. Linguistic and pragmatic approaches. p. 84 – 108. John Benjamins. pdf
• Achimova, A., van Os, M., Demberg, V., & Butz, M. V. (2024). Interpreting implausible event descriptions under noise. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 46), p. 3399 – 3406. open access
• Achimova, A., Scontras, G., Eisemann, E., & M.V. Butz. (2023). Active social inference in multi-trial signaling games. Open  mind, 7. open access
• Achimova, A., Stegemann-Philipps, C., Winkler, S., & M.V. Butz. (2022). Anaphoric reference in descriptions of surprising events. In Gutzmann, D. & S. Repp, Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 26, pp. 20 - 34.
• Achimova, A., Scontras, G., Stegemann-Philipps, C., Lohmann, J., & M.V. Butz. (2022). Learning about others: pragmatic social inference through ambiguity resolution. Cognition, 218, 104862. paper
• Stegemann-Philipps, C., Butz, M., Winkler, S., & Achimova, A. (2021). Speakers use more informative referring expressions to describe surprising events. Proceedings of the 43nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
• Butz, M. V., Achimova, A., Bilkey, D., & Knott, A. (2021). Event-Predictive Cognition: A Root for Conceptual Human Thought. Topics in Cognitive Science, 13(1).  pdf
• Achimova, A., Deprez, V., Musolino, J (2018). Structural asymmetry in question/ quantifier interactions. In Katalin E. Kiss & Tamás Zétényi (Eds.): Linguistic and cognitive aspects of quantification, Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol. 47, Springer, Cham. 13 – 30.
• Achimova, A., Syrett, K., Musolino, J., Déprez, V (2017). Children’s developing knowledge of wh-/quantifier question-answer relations. Language Learning and Development, 1. 80 – 99.

Presentations

• Peters, B., Çapar, S.S., König, P., & A. Achimova. The weight of words: Credibility of projected content depends on presupposition trigger type and prior knowledge. Poster to be presented at XPrag 2025. Cambridge, UK. poster
• Achimova, A., Messner, P., M.V. Butz, & D. Wildgruber. The election outcome was interesting! Strategic indirectness in a cross-cultural perspective. Paper presented at the Biannual conference of the German Cognitive Science Society, KogWis 2025. Bochum, Germany. September 3, 2025.
• Peters, B., Çapar, S.C., König, P., & A. Achimova. Inferring the truth: a psycholinguistic look into direct and accommodated evidence. Paper presented at the Biannual conference of the German Cognitive Science Society, KogWis 2025. Bochum, Germany. September 1, 2025.
• Dietrich, S., Achimova, A., Butz, M.V., Seibold, V., & B. Rolke. The Bear or the Lion – Who Did It? The Role of Verbs and Adjectives in Pronoun Resolution. Poster presented at the Biannual conference of the German Cognitive Science Society, KogWis 2025. Bochum, Germany. September 2, 2025. Best poster award.
• Achimova, A. Presuppositions in discourse. Introduction to rhetoric, Utrecht University. April 16, 2025
• Achimova, A. The effect of event predictability on production and interpretation of anaphoric references. Multimodal Language Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. April 15, 2025
• Achimova, A. A neo-Gricean account of indirect communication. Experimental linguistics talk series, Utrecht University. April 14, 2025
• Achimova, A., Peters, B., Çapar, S.S., & P. König. Persuasion without accountability: the case of projection inferences. Flash-talk to be presented at the Workshop "Combating misinformation in the digital age''. Tübingen, Germany. April 2, 2025
• Achimova, A., Franke, M., & M.V. Butz. Indirectness as a path to common ground management. Paper presented at the Workshop 
  “Background beliefs in the construction of meaning”. Tübingen, Germany. January 10, 2025.