Research projects
My research is predominantly in experimental semantics and pragmatics, and focuses on the motivation for speakers' choice of expressions, and particularly on the interplay between strategic and automatic processes. My PhD was about the meaning and use of numerically-quantified expressions (and was supported by a University of Cambridge Domestic Research Studentship).
In project A3 (Dialogue and group dynamics) of SFB 673 (Alignment in Communication), we research the behaviour of participants in non-dyadic interactions. Here our aim is to show whether alignment between interlocutors is driven primarily by participants' conscious decisions or their unconscious exposure to contextual influence.
I'm part of three projects funded by EURO-XPRAG:
- a project to develop and test a constraint-based account of numerical quantifier usage and interpretation, with Uli Sauerland and Stephanie Solt (ZAS, Berlin)
- a project attempting to document a preference in processing for the use of approximate expressions of quantity, with Stephanie Solt (ZAS, Berlin) and Marijan Palmovic (Zagreb)
- a project investigating the time-course of the accommodation of presuppositions, with Richard Breheny (UCL), Emmanuel Chemla (ENS), Bart Geurts (Radboud University Nijmegen) and Napoleon Katsos.
I'm also working with my former supervisor, Napoleon Katsos, on testing the time-course of the use of epistemic state information in scalar implicature. This has implications for our understanding of how, and to what extent, context is relevant to hearers when drawing scalar inferences. A further collaboration with Napoleon Katsos and Patrícia Amaral (UNC-Chapel Hill) addresses the processing of non-asserted content, including cases customarily treated as presuppositional.
My other research interests include the computational modelling of various aspects of language use, and the development and criticism of novel experimental and statistical methodologies. I am interested in neurolinguistics and have contributed to a recent project on the neurocognition of prosody (PI Brechtje Post).