Marieke Schouwstra: Language and iconicity in the lab: experience, learning, and interaction Iconicity can aid the learning of a new language, but the relationship between language and iconicity is complex and has many layers. In this talk I will discuss experimental work that aims to help us better understand this complex interconnectedness. First, I will…

Hans Hoeken: Determinants of Perceived Message Convincingness Every day, people face many messages that aim to change their opinions and behaviors. And almost automatically and effortlessly, people have an intuition about how convincing these messages are. Interestingly, Mercier and Sperber (2017) claim that these rapidly produced convincingness intuitions often approximate the judgments that would result…

Merel Scholman: Individual differences in connective comprehension: The effect of linguistic experience and general reasoning skills The comprehension of connectives is crucial for understanding the discourse relations that make up a text. We studied connective comprehension in English to investigate whether adult comprehenders acquire the meaning and intended use of connectives to a similar extent,…

Aviv Schoenfeld: Numeral modification of plural mass nouns: The role of estimation Groceries ‘grocery items’, clothes and cattle lack singular counterparts and are reported as unmodifiable by small numerals. Alongside that, Allan (1980) reports cattle as modifiable by 500. The hypothesized existence of speakers who judge {#2, 500} cattle makes correct corpus predictions. In iWeb (Davies 2018–), six plural nouns without singular counterparts are modified…

Jeremy Kuhn: Diachrony and polysemy of Negative polarity items: An artificial grammar study Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) are words that are only grammatical in certain negative contexts. Two well known diachronic patterns involve NPIs. First is Jespersen’s cycle: an NPI appearing in the scope of negation is reanalyzed as itself the marker of negation. Second,…

Implicature priming, inverse preference, and context adaptation (based on joint work with Paul Marty, Jacopo Romoli and Richard Breheny) Previous studies that use priming to investigate scalar implicatures (SIs) observe that SIs arise more often after strong primes—priming trials that force readings with SIs—than after weak primes—priming trials that force readings without SIs. To explain…

A comparison between children and adults performing on a reference game using the Coloring Book method Within linguistics there are different fields on how to study language. In the last 20 years the field of pragmatics has become popular for investigation and experimentation. Pragmatics is the study of the meaning of language within context. It…

Affective Language Processing: Language-driven Evaluation of Character Affect in Morally Loaded Narratives Reading negative affect adjectives, e.g.,’angry’, generally elicits increased activation of the corrugator supercilii (‘frowning muscle’), while positive adjectives, e.g., ‘happy’, can cause relaxation. This is presumably a result of mental simulation. In a moral context, the corrugator may also be affected by evaluation,…

Alternate categorization: a formal-conceptual semantics of reciprocal alternations In this talk, we present an experimental study that investigates how the different forms of a reciprocal verbs are connected to each other. Reciprocal verbs as hug, fight and collide alternate between a unary collective form (1), a “with” form (2) and a binary form (3): Wendy…

Familiar false facts vs. novel truths: The influence of readers’ background knowledge on processing and acquiring false information I will present an ERP study that investigates how conceptual knowledge supports comprehension and learning (i.e., a familiarity effect) and protects against accepting false information (i.e., false information effect) both during learning and during later memory retrieval….