My research interests lie primarily in Experimental Pragmatics and Psycholinguistics, investigating how people derive meaning from language in context. My research has approached several topics from this perspective, notably emojis and lying.
My dissertation – “The roles of linguistic meaning and context in the concept of lying” – explored a notoriously tricky case within experimental pragmatics: when someone says something that is technically true but implies something false, can that count as a lie? As shown in the various experiments of the dissertation, the answer to that varies based on how strongly that implied content is communicated and various aspects of the context of the conversation.
My other main area of focus has been on the language processing of emojis, including ERP studies measuring neural activity when people read emojis in real time. This work has been featured in publications like The Guardian, The Washington Post, and Mashable.
Ongoing projects include investigations of emoji and pragmatic commitment, lexical and combinatorial properties of emoji, and further work on distinctions between lying and misleading.
Collaborators include Neil Cohn of Tilburg University’s Visual Language Lab, Marina Terkourafi of Leiden University, Darren Tanner of Microsoft’s AI For Good, and Laurie Feldman of SUNY Albany.