Psychoblog

Dear all,

Dr. Sammy Floyd (MIT) will give a virtual talk at the CogSci Colloquium on Thursday, June 2nd, at 14:30 (CEST).

Title: What are the relationships between pragmatic language abilities?

Abstract: People routinely communicate meanings which are not literally encoded; we may say ‚It’s getting late‘ to politely indicate that we would like to leave, or describe a dancer as a ’swan‘. Many language phenomena have been called non-literal or pragmatic, from humor, to white lies, metaphors and more. However, the relationships between pragmatic language abilities are not well understood: Does all non-literal communication rely on the same set of mental computations? Or do communicators rely on a collection of distinct computations? I’ll present in-progress work which aims to shed light on these questions. First, I’ll describe a set of pragmatic language and psychometric tasks for measuring individual differences. Then I’ll show preliminary results from these tasks using exploratory analyses, and solicit feedback before another round of data collection.

Dr. Floyd agreed to have few single/small-group meetings after her talk. If you are interested in meeting with her to discuss your own or her research, please register by tomorrow (May 31) by sending an e-mail to Lydia Schidelko (lydiapaulin.schidelko@uni-goettingen.de).

The talk will be held online, via Zoom:
https://uni-goettingen.zoom.us/j/62309706784?pwd=dXVFNWpDS0pmR1dubFl5N2R5UFprdz09

Meeting ID: 623 0970 6784
Passcode: 553057