People

LCL_Fall2019

Principal Investigator:

I am interested in how the mind assembles meaning, how this capacity came to be, and how it interacts with other cognitive abilities. I investigate the decisions that speakers face when they wrap their messages in grammar. Speakers make structural choices dozens of times per day, and listeners rapidly process them, make inferences about why something was said in a particular way, and create a representation of the speaker’s intended meaning in their minds.

Senior Staff:

Joshua Wampler

I am a graduate student in Linguistics. I am interested in meaning, both as supplied by lexical items and as supplied by context. My work focuses on event representations and reference resolution. I am particularly interested in how people conceptualize events, and how this conceptualization affects how people establish reference to events (or subevents). Underlying all of this is a general interest in the conceptual ontology of events, and how this does (or doesn’t) correspond to the conceptual ontology of objects.

Sean Trott

I am a graduate student in Cognitive Science. My primary interest is in how language comprehenders construct meaning from under-specified and often ambiguous linguistic input. Which linguistic and extra-linguistic cues do comprehenders exploit, and which cognitive resources do they bring to bear on the problem of comprehension? Further, what can constraints on language production and comprehension tell us about why languages look the way they do?

Catherine Arnett

I am currently looking at reduplication in Mandarin and how people interpret it. I am generally interested in the syntax-semantics interface, psycholinguistics, dialectal variation, language variation and change, and corpus linguistics.

Ebru Evcen

Broadly speaking, I am interested in the issues at the interface between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics cross-linguistically. My research focuses on how, as language unfolds, we incrementally build representations of the events described by that unfolding language and how speakers develop a sufficiently rich linguistic meaning during comprehension. Currently, I am looking at how people interpret counterfactuals.