Modeling Listeners’ Online Adaptation as Bayesian Rational Belief Update. In my dissertation, I expanded on previous research showing that listeners compute fewer contrastive inferences when their interlocutor produces redundant descriptions, showing that such sensitivity to interlocutor behavior is reduced when listeners are under working memory load. With collaborators in Osnabrück, I am investigating the basis and time-course of such listener sensitivity: Do listeners incorporate information about the speaker over time, gradually modifying their behavior over the course of an interaction? Or do listeners stop computing contrastive inferences as soon as they have evidence that speakers are overinformative? Can this phenomenon be modeled as a Bayesian rational belief update process in which listeners’ update prior beliefs about speaker production behavior after observing speakers deviate from expectation? If so, how does this process change under working memory load?
Effects of Speaker-Specific Information on Pragmatic Processing; a project investigating the suspensibility of contrastive inference, a quantity-based pragmatic inference related to scalar implicature, in contexts where speaker behavior deviates from Gricean pragmatic principles.
Scalar Implicature & Working Memory; a project investigating the effects of working memory load on the processing of scalar quantifiers associated with scalar implicature. We examine the millisecond-to-millisecond effects of load on scalar-implicature processing, and the differential effects of load on semantic vs. pragmatic processing and on numeral vs. scalar quantifier interpretation.
Contrastive Inference & Working Memory; investigating the effects of working memory load on the computation of contrastive inferences. We examine the millisecond-to-millisecond effects of load on language users’ ability to infer contrast from modifier use based on the Gricean assumption that speakers are optimally informative in constructing referential expressions.
Semantics/Pragmatics of English Tense; an investigation of the referential behavior of tense in English. The present tense behaves vacuously in some contexts but not others; under a presuppositional theory of tense in which the present tense morpheme is semantically vacuous, I show this behavior could result from the interaction of general pragmatic principles and covert semantic operators introduced by tense morphemes.
Philosophy of Linguistics Reading Group: a reading group created as a space for linguists interested in philosophy of science to discuss the scientific status of linguistic methodologies, the position of contemporary linguistics in the history of science, and the relationship between linguistics and other sciences.
300 Languages Project; an effort by The Rosetta Project (part of The Long Now Foundation) to build a universal parallel speech-text corpus of human language
The Space of Language (2008); a performance-installation at University of Michigan’s Arts on Earth produced in collaboration with Thylias Moss and Brian McCorkle
Metaphysics of Time & Semantics of Tense; an attempt to disentangle semantic ontology from metaphysical ontology via a resolution of the apparent incompatibility of tense semantics with the B-theory of time.
DEB|T (2018); a performance with Michael Endick at Wild Embeddings in Brooklyn addressing parallels between the construction of linguistic meaning and the construction of monetary value.
