Stavroula Alexandropoulou is a PhD candidate at Utrecht University. Her research lies in the area of semantics and pragmatics combining theoretical and experimental approaches, with a special focus on the pragmatics of scalar quantifiers such as modified numerals. Other topics she has worked on include bare singular count nouns and inalienable possession.
Sam Alxatib is Assistant Professor in Linguistics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He studied linguistics in Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, and in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is interested in semantic, pragmatic, and syntactic theory, and in methodological issues in linguistic research. He has worked on vague phenomena, gradability and degree semantics, the semantics of evaluativity, focus, tense, and aspect, and the interaction of aspect with modality.
Jennifer E. Arnold is Professor in the department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She does research on the psychology of language, examining how the discourse context affects both language production and comprehension. Much of her research examines reference. When does the speaker say ‘she’ vs. ‘the woman’? How clearly are the words pronounced? Dr Arnold examines these questions as they relate to processes of utterance planning, disfluency, and the ability for speakers to model the knowledge and perspective of their addressee.
David Barner is Professor of Psychology and Linguistics at the University of California, San Diego. His research spans topics including word learning, counting, grammatical number, quantifier acquisition, and pragmatic development, with a focus on cross-linguistic comparisons.
Jean-François Bonnefon (PhD, cognitive psychology) is Research Director at the Toulouse School of Economics (France). He is affiliated with the Toulouse School of Management Research, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse. He studies the rational mind in its various manifestations: reasoning, decision-making, and morality. His recent research applies the insights of moral psychology and behavioural economics to the new challenges of machine ethics and human-AI cooperation.
Adrian Brasoveanu is Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Affiliated Faculty in the Center for Statistical Analysis in the Social Sciences, UC Santa Cruz. He is a formal semanticist and a computational psycholinguist. The main question driving his research is: what is linguistic meaning and how does the human mind grasp it? He builds evidence-based mathematically and computationally explicit theories of natural language meaning (product) and interpretation (process) that try to answer this question.
Richard Breheny is Reader in Linguistics in the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences at University College London. His work spans theoretical semantics and pragmatics, experimental linguistics, and psycholinguistics. Together with his then student Napoleon Katsos, he organized the first official ‘Experimental Pragmatics’ conference in Cambridge, 2005. He was also a founder of the original ESF-funded XPrag Research Network.
Patricia J. Brooks is Professor of Psychology at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York (CUNY) where she directs the Language Learning Laboratory. She serves as the Deputy Executive Officer of the CUNY PhD Program in Psychology (Area: Pedagogy) and Faculty Advisor to the Graduate Student Teaching Association of the American Psychological Association. Her research interests are in two broad areas: (1) individual differences in L1 and L2 acquisition; (2) development of effective pedagogy to support diverse learners.
Sherry Yong Chen is a PhD student at the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She began her life as a linguist at the University of Hong Kong, and she was later trained at the University of Oxford. Sherry is broadly interested in issues related to syntax, semantics, and their interfaces, involving both theoretical and experimental inquiry. Her recent experimental work has a particular focus on language acquisition as well as the role of memory mechanisms during sentence processing.
Chris Cummins is a Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. He previously worked at Bielefeld University, having received his PhD from the University of Cambridge. His research interests include the pragmatic interpretation of quantity expressions, and how this bears upon reasoning and decisionmaking; he has also published on the topics of presupposition, speech acts, and metaphor. He is the author of Constraints on Numerical Expressions (OUP, 2015).
Catherine Davies is Lecturer in Linguistics in the School of Languages, Cultures & Societies at the University of Leeds. Catherine uses experimental data (behavioural; eye-tracking) to investigate the development and processing of pragmatics, especially in the use of referring expressions. Her main area of research investigates how children and adults integrate information from communicative contexts into their referential choices in production and comprehension. She is also interested in psycholinguistic processing within its social context, for example how language environments interact with language processing and development.
Judith Degen is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Stanford University. Trained as a cognitive scientist at the University of Rochester and Stanford University, Judith is interested in the inference processes involved in language production and comprehension—how do speakers choose an utterance to convey an intended meaning? How do listeners arrive at interpretations that are often much richer and more detailed than the literal meaning provided by a sentence? She employs a combination of linguistic analysis, behavioural methods, corpus methods, and computational models to develop explicit theories of these processes and test them against behavioural data.
J. P. de Ruiter is Bridge Professor in the Cognitive Sciences at the departments of Computer Science and Psychology at Tufts University. He was trained as a cognitive scientist at Radboud University Nijmegen, and developed a cognitive model of speech and gesture production during his PhD research project at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. His primary interests are the cognitive foundations of communication, social robotics, gesture, turn-taking, pragmatics, and the intersection between scientific methodology and philosophy of science. He also co-produces a podcast on Bayesian statistics.
Jakub Dotlačil is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Logic, Language and Computation at the University of Amsterdam. He received his PhD in linguistics from Utrecht University. His main research interests are formal semantic theories of quantification and discourse, experimental research on processing, and cognitive modelling of processing and incremental interpretation. He investigates properties of symbolic systems, as developed, for example, in formal semantics, as well as how such symbolic systems are to be linked to human performance and behavioural data.
Giulio Dulcinati trained in linguistics and experimental psychology at University College London. He completed a PhD in Linguistics in 2018. He is interested in the experimental investigation of pragmatic inferences and how they are affected by the assumptions that we make about our interlocutors. Most of his experimental work focuses on the role of assumptions of cooperation among interlocutors in the derivation of pragmatic inferences in conversation.
Heather Ferguson is Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the University of Kent. She trained in psychology at the University of Glasgow, then worked as a postdoctoral researcher in linguistics at University College London. Heather’s research focuses on the interface between cognitive processes and social interaction, specifically the way that we access and represent other people’s perspectives during communication. She employs a variety of techniques, including eye movements, neuroscientific methods, and behavioural techniques to examine the time-course of integration, the underlying neural mechanisms, and the extent to which constraints from world knowledge and context compete to influence social communication.
Myrto Grigoroglou is a PhD candidate in Linguistics & Cognitive Science at the University of Delaware. She completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Athens, Greece, and has an MA from the University Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle, France. Myrto studies how children and adults use language in communication with an emphasis on referential communication and pragmatic inference. She is particularly interested in how the pragmatic system develops in children and how it interacts with the semantic system as well as other non-linguistic aspects of cognition (e.g. social or spatial cognition).
Thomas Holtgraves is Professor of Psychological Science at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. He conducts interdisciplinary research into multiple facets of language and social psychology. He is the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Language and Social Psychology (Oxford University Press, 2014) and author of Language as Social Action: Social Psychology and Language Use (Erlbaum, 2002).
E. Matthew Husband is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics at the University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow of St. Hugh’s College. Prior to his current post, Matt studied at Michigan State University, taught at Brown University, and was a postdoc at University of South Carolina. Matt has had a sustained interest in grammatically relevant elements of sentence meanings and how they are computed in real time. His research makes use of behavioural and neurophysiological techniques, from acceptability judgements and eye movements to electroencephalography and functional magnetic resonance imaging.
Marie Juanchich (PhD, Socio-Cognitive Psychology) is Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the Faculty of Science and Health at the University of Essex. Marie trained as an experimental psychologist in Toulouse, France. Her research generally focuses on uncertainty and risk communication. She is particularly interested in the way people leverage the language of uncertainty to convey subtle information and how this subtle information shapes the judgements and decisions of recipients. One of the reasons this topic is of particular interest is its many potential applications (e.g. medicine, finance, climate change)—given that nothing is certain! Marie’s work draws from the literature in social and cognitive psychology but also from linguistics and mostly uses experimental methodologies.
Napoleon Katsos is a Reader in Experimental Pragmatics at the University of Cambridge. He is interested in how we learn, process, and use the meaning of words and sentences, with emphasis on quantification and implicature. He draws relevant evidence from linguistic theory and experimental psychology, including sentence processing and typical or atypical language acquisition by monolingual or bilingual children.
Christina S. Kim is Lecturer in Linguistics in the Department of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Kent. Since early in her studies, Christina has been involved in both linguistics and language processing, training at MIT, UCLA, the University of Rochester, and the University of Chicago. Christina is interested in how we use available linguistic and non-linguistic information to infer context-dependent aspects of meaning. She has worked on topics like presupposition, focus, ellipsis, and syntactic ambiguity resolution, using behavioural paradigms such as self-paced reading and Visual World eye-tracking.
Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga is a postdoctoral researcher at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge. Dimitra trained as a linguist in Thessaloniki, Greece, and received a PhD in Cognitive Science and Language from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Her work investigates meaning and variation in meaning as related to variation in form and use, with a focus on determiners, nominals, and quantifiers. She conducts theoretical and experimental research in semantics and pragmatics mainly on Greek and English and draws on data from mono- and bilingual adult and child populations.
Yaron McNabb is a researcher and Lecturer at the Department of Languages, Literature and Communication at Utrecht University. Yaron received his PhD in linguistics at the University of Chicago and subsequently worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Konstanz. Yaron investigates how form, structure, and meaning in the sentential and conversational context interact in instances of vagueness and (im)precision, namely in gradable adjectives, degree modifiers, and quantity expressions.
Rick Nouwen is Associate Professor at the department of Languages, Literature and Communication at Utrecht University. He has worked on many topics in semantics and pragmatics, including scalarity, quantification, degree semantics, plurality, and pronominal reference. He owns a blue Volvo and is currently the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Semantics.
Ira Noveck earned his PhD at NYU (1992) in Experimental Psychology as a specialist of human reasoning. Through his work, he became interested in the semantic contributions of, and the pragmatic inferences associated with, logical terms and how such features could impact on reasoning performance. This led to a programmatic effort to experimentally investigate phenomena associated with pragmatics generally. He is currently a full-time Directeur de Recherche at France’s Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and works at the Institut des Sciences Cognitives—Marc Jeannerod in Lyon.
Edgar Onea is Full Professor of Linguistics at the Department for German Studies of the University of Graz. After his PhD at the University of Heidelberg, Edgar Onea worked in Stuttgart and Göttingen. He has published on various topics at the semantics-pragmatics interface including information structure, it-clefts, discourse structure, and referentiality. His experimental research currently concentrates on the interpretation of marked structures and exhaustivity inferences.
Anna Papafragou is Professor of Cognitive Psychology and Linguistics at the University of Delaware. She gained her PhD in Linguistics from University College London and received postdoctoral training at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania. Her work focuses on the nature and acquisition of language, especially in the areas of semantics and pragmatics. She has also conducted extensive cross-linguistic research examining the relation between language and other cognitive systems, especially in the domains of space, events and theory of mind.
Olga Parshina is a PhD student in the Psychology Department at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). Previously she received an MA in Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Delaware. Her research interests include L1 and L2 acquisition, sequence learning, and bilingual language comprehension using the eye-tracking paradigm.
Nausicaa Pouscoulous trained in philosophy and cognitive science in France and received her PhD from the Institut Jean Nicod and the Institut des Sciences Cognitives. She then studied the development of pragmatic processes in children at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Currently, as Lecturer in Experimental Pragmatics in the Linguistics Department at University College London, she continues to combine experimental and theoretical approaches in her research on pragmatic inferences.
Hugh Rabagliati is Reader in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. He studied psychology at Oxford and at New York University, where he received his PhD in 2010. He is interested in how children learn, understand, and use language, with a particular focus on semantics. His current research topics include word learning, as well as the development of sentence processing and language production skills.
Hannah Rohde is Reader in Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh. Her training in Linguistics and Computer Science at Brown University led to a PhD in Linguistics at the University of California San Diego, followed by postdoctoral positions at Northwestern and Stanford. She works in experimental pragmatics, using psycholinguistic techniques to investigate questions in areas such as pronoun interpretation, referring expression generation, implicature, presupposition, and the establishment of discourse coherence.
Jacopo Romoli is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at Ulster University and Director of the Masters in English Language and Linguistics. He is also Associate Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders. Romoli received his PhD from the Department of Linguistics at Harvard University. Romoli’s research focuses on formal semantics and pragmatics for natural languages, language processing, and language acquisition. His current research interests are presuppositions, scalar implicatures, plurality, free choice inferences, neg-raising phenomena, assertability constraints, conditionals, and scope interactions.
Paula Rubio-Fernández is a researcher at the Philosophy Department of the University of Oslo. Paula trained as a linguist at the Universidad de Oviedo in Spain and then specialized in experimental pragmatics for her PhD at the University of Cambridge. She is interested in how children and adults use their Theory of Mind in communication. She has designed Theory of Mind tasks to investigate the role of language processing and pragmatics in those paradigms, and also referential communication tasks that require perspective taking and epistemic inferences. Paula is currently researching the development of efficient communication across the lifespan.
Uli Sauerland is Vice-Director and Head of the Semantics-Pragmatics department at the Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (ZAS) in Berlin. His training was first in mathematics at the University of Konstanz, and then in linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He teaches regularly at the University of Potsdam and has taught at many universities as a visiting professor including the Universities of Vienna, Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, Harvard, and Stanford. Uli’s goal is to understand the structures underlying human logical thought. To do so, he studies how thoughts are expressed in language, and how language is used to communicate thoughts.
Petra B. Schumacher is Professor of Empirical Linguistics at the Department of German Language and Literature I at the University of Cologne, Germany. She received her PhD in Linguistics from Yale University. Her research focuses on processes at the interface of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, with emphasis on reference resolution, information structure, and various aspects of meaning constitution in discourse. Her key interest is the time-course of language comprehension, which she investigates by means of on-line methods, in particular event-related brain potential studies, cross-linguistic investigations, and research with different speaker populations.
Florian Schwarz received his PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and is currently Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. He studies natural language comprehension in context from both formal semantic and experimental perspectives. His main line of ongoing research investigates the on-line comprehension of presupposition in relation to current issues in presupposition theory, using a variety of empirical methods, including picture matching tasks, reading time studies, and visual world eye-tracking. Other topics of interest include definite descriptions, implicatures, and intensional semantics.
Miroslav Sirota (PhD, cognitive psychology) is Lecturer in Psychology at the Faculty of Science and Health at the University of Essex. In his research, he is trying to understand how people estimate, judge, reason, and make decisions in situations of uncertainty and risk, how people do these ‘on their own’ and ‘in the presence of the others’, ‘in the lab’ and ‘in the wild’. His recent research focused on improving health risk communication between health carers and the public, and diagnostic and management decision-making of family physicians.
Dimitrios Skordos is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the School of Languages, Linguistics, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Calgary. Dimitrios trained at the University of Delaware and at UC San Diego. His main research interests include experimental semantics and pragmatics and the development of pragmatic inference in children with a focus on quantifiers and logical connectives. He investigates these topics using interdisciplinary research methods from theoretical linguistics and developmental psychology.
Stephanie Solt is a researcher in semantics at the Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) in Berlin, Germany. She holds an AB in Mathematics from Bryn Mawr College and a PhD in Linguistics from the CUNY Graduate Center. Stephanie’s research focuses on how natural languages encode scalar meaning, and how speakers choose to communicate concepts of degree and quantity. She has worked on topics including quantifiers and quantity adjectives, approximation and scale granularity, adjectival vagueness, degree modification and subjectivity. Her most recent project, funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG), investigates the semantics of attenuating polarity items in the degree domain.
Nicola Spotorno trained in philosophy at University San Raffaele in Milan and earned his PhD in cognitive sciences (2012) at the Institute for Cognitive Sciences in Lyon where he worked in the framework of experimental pragmatics. He has more recently shifted his focus to the investigation of cognitive deficits in neurodegenerative conditions. Nicola is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Lund where he uses neuroimaging in order to uncover biomarkers of neurodegenerative diseases.
Mahesh Srinivasan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his BS in Symbolic Systems in 2005 from Stanford University and his PhD in Psychology in 2011 from Harvard University. Mahesh is interested in how linguistic and conceptual representations arise and interact with one another in human development. His research on language has focused on a range of topics, including word learning and pragmatic development.
Kristen Syrett is Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey—New Brunswick, with a co-appointment at the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS). She is Director of the Rutgers Laboratory for Developmental Language Studies. Dr Syrett received her PhD in Linguistics from Northwestern University in 2007, with a specialization in Cognitive Science. She held a one-year postdoctoral appointment at RuCCS, followed by a three-year NRSA postdoctoral fellowship through the National Institutes of Health in Psychology. Dr Syrett’s research focuses on how children acquire language and how we assign interpretations to words and sentences. She is especially interested in instances of ambiguity, and the interaction of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics in topics such as definiteness, predication, quantification, and measurement.
Michael K. Tanenhaus is the Beverly Petterson Bishop and Charles W. Bishop Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester and Chair Professor, School of Psychology at Nanjing Normal University. His research has focused on real-time language processing, including issues in experimental semantics and pragmatics. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Tanenhaus’ research demonstrated that syntactic ambiguity resolution involves rapid integration of probabilistic constraints, including rich lexical representations, results that help form the foundation of current probabilistic approaches. In 1995, Tanenhaus and his students pioneered use of a paradigm—which they dubbed the visual world paradigm—in which eye movements are monitored as participants perform actions as they follow spoken instructions or collaborate with interlocutors in collaborative tasks using natural language. This made it possible to study real-time spoken language processing at a fine temporal grain in natural tasks in rich contexts.
Ye Tian is Computational Linguist at Amazon Alexa (UK), Honorary Research Fellow in the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London, and Associated Member of the Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle, Université Paris Diderot. Her research area is semantics and pragmatics, with methods including formal, experimental, corpus, and computational.
Lyn Tieu is Senior Research Fellow at Western Sydney University, in the Education and Aspirational Change theme at the Office of the Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research & Innovation). She is also a member of the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour & Development, Associate Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, and Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University. Lyn received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Connecticut. Her research investigates children’s language development, in particular their acquisition of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.
Judith Tonhauser is Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at The Ohio State University. She holds a Diploma in Linguistics from the University of Stuttgart and a PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University. Judith’s research explores universals and variation in how typologically distinct languages convey meaning; recent research areas include temporal interpretation, nominal reference, focus, and presuppositions. She collects primary data from Paraguayan Guaraní (Tupí-Guaraní) and English through one-on-one elicitation, experiments, and corpus work.
Ming Xiang is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Chicago. Her primary research area is psycholinguistics, especially sentence and discourse processing. Using a wide range of behavioural and electrophysiological methodologies, her research examines how linguistic structures are represented, stored, and accessed during language comprehension, and how language users make inferences based on both their linguistic knowledge and non-linguistic context.