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Research

We study how social context affects language comprehension and interpretation in several domains:


Social group effects on pragmatic processing (Funded by the Israeli Science Founded & the Mind and Language Center):

Social groups are categories, such as age, gender, language, or political affiliation, that are used to define self-identities. In this large-scale project, we ask how such social characteristics of the speaker affect language processing and pragmatic inferencing. We propose (Kuperwasser & Shetreet, submitted) that cognitive functions, such as Theory of Mind and Executive Functions, mediate the effects. We examine a wide range of pragmatic phenomena, including referential communication, scalar implicatures and metaphors, in various social groups and using various methodologies such as mouse tracking and fMRI.

Speaker-specific language use

Language use varies among speakers. In this project, we examine under which conditions people learn and align to speaker-specific language use, and whether this learning is extended to other linguistic and social information that is used out of the context of the specific conversation. We further examine various social factors that can affect learning and alignment, including foreignness and cooperation.

Trust, lies and truth assessment

Our era is characterized by the spread of misinformation. Thus, understanding the factors that contribute to the evaluation of truthfulness becomes critical. As truth assessment is fundamentally linked to language processing, this project examines the bidirectional influence between the two. We utilize various metrics of truth assessment, including trust and commitment and various linguistic factors including implicit/explicit information or narrative interpretation. A different project examines deceptive acts by which speakers manipulate language in various ways to avoid the societal consequences of lying, by telling a literal, yet misleading, truth. We examine what linguistic and social factors contribute to truth assessment. This includes subjectivity of the content, the speaker’s identity, the situational context or the power relations between the speaker and the addressee.

Scalar terms (funded by the Israeli Science Foundation)

In this research, we examine the interpretation of weak scalar terms, based on either lexical scales or context-dependent, ad-hoc, scales. Such terms can give rise to a logical/semantic interpretation (i.e., lower-bounded reading) or a pragmatic interpretation (i.e., upper-bounded reading). Using various experimental methods, from simple truth-value judgment to act-out drawing task and fMRI, we assess the differences in interpretation within different types of lexical scalar terms and between lexical and ad-hoc s0calar terms, as well as between speakers. (Joint work with Prof. Mira Ariel).