Dr. Roland Mühlenbernd is a senior researcher in the DFG project A05 Modeling meaning-driven register variation within the framework of the SFB 1412 Register: Language-Users’ Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation / Research area 4 'Semantics & Pragmatics'.

He is particularly interested in the question of how individual behavior affects social conventions and norms. With regard to human language, he would like to gain insights into why speakers and listeners make certain decisions in language production and perception, and how these decisions affect the language system in the long term. For this purpose, he develops (especially game-theoretic) communication models and examines them (i) using solution concepts from (evolutionary) game theory, (ii) through computational approaches, and (iii) through artificial language experiments. He is particularly interested in questions within the linguistic research areas of language change/language evolution and semantics/pragmatics.