I’m interested in how people use language to create and manage meaning in communication, both when interacting with others and when producing and interpreting language in various other settings. In my research I use primarily quantitative empirical methods, including controlled experimentation as well as computational and corpus analysis. I use these methods to investigate how linguistic and extralinguistic contextual cues modulate people’s discourse expectations and in turn affect their understanding and their ascription of actions and mental states, as well as how pragmatic and interactional aspects of human communication affect the emergence and evolution of linguistic meaning and structure.
In my doctoral research, supervised by Michael Franke and Manfred Krifka, I used psycholinguistic methods to explore how indexical markers of stance affect incremental language interpretation. As case studies, I looked at negated polar questions with epistemic biases in English and German, modal particles in German, and intensifying adjectives in English. In previous research, I have used experimental semiotic methods to investigate questions related to the emergence and evolution of linguistic meaning and structure, for instance how a mechanism for conversational repair might help counteract noise in communication and, by extension, modulate the emergence of systematic structure in language, or how multimodal signaling might help ground new communicative symbols in face-to-face interaction.
In my current position as a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of English Language and Linguistics, I’m investigating how English speakers use different linguistic devices to talk about quantity.