Members

I began my academic pursuits by studying experimental psychology, with a focus on human reasoning, which led in no particular order to my interests in development, neuroscience, communication and language. It makes sense now to find myself in the richly interdisciplinary Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle, where we are surrounded by experts from a range of linguistics subdisciplines and who study a wide range of phenomena. Similarly, the GRISP – using mostly experimental methods – is pursuing a wide range of issues as well. We are currently carrying out projects on discourse connectives, modals, numerical meaning, scalar implicatures (of course), idioms, irony, and metaphor.

I am a PhD student researching "What Makes the Processing of Idioms Unique?". Before I was in Paris, I was awarded a master's degree in Linguistics at the University of Göttingen. In Germany, I completed a project on "The Vagueness of Indeterminate Gradable Adjectives" under the supervision of Clemens Steiner-Mayr. During this project, I sought to test my theoretical inclinations and rapidly I developed a great interest in experimental pragmatics. I came to Paris under the SMARTS-UP mobility scholarship as an M2 student and this is how I began to collaborate with Ira Noveck on the topic of idiom processing.

I’m currently working on my PhD thesis on processing of extended metaphors under the supervision of Ira Noveck. I'm interested in extended metaphors because it is unclear whether they require a different type of processing from single metaphors or not. If they do, we need a more nuanced view of metaphor processing. I am also interested in looking at how mind reading abilities affect pragmatic processing by seeing how assumptions about speakers and genres mediate metaphor processing. Before coming to Paris, I wrote my MA thesis on processing differences between metaphors and similes at the University of Oslo under the supervision of Camilo R. Ronderos and Nicholas E. Allott. In Oslo, I was also Lab Manager of the DEVCOM Lab (led by Ingrid L. Falkum) for two and a half years where we investigated the role of sense conventions in children’s understanding of figurative language.

I am currently a postdoc at the University of Oslo working with Ingrid Lossius Falkum on the development of pragmatic abilities (irony, imprecision, metaphor). Before that, I completed my PhD in 2021 at the Humboldt University in Berlin, where I worked on non-nominal metaphor processing under the supervision of Pia Knoeferle. I’m most interested in how comprehenders think about the attitudes, beliefs and intentions of their interlocutors to make sense of the utterances they encounter. Together with Ira, we have developed this line by looking at the comprehension of irony and scalar implicatures. With Filippo Domaneschi (University of Genova), we are pursuing this line to study the processing of negative expressive adjectives (such as 'damn' or 'fuck'). At the University of Oslo, we are taking a developmental perspective to investigate why children seem to be more pragmatic than adults when it comes to tolerating imprecise usages of adjectives such as ‘straight’ and ‘full’.

Before Kira joined our lab, she studied at Wellesley College, where she graduated in 2020 with a bachelor's degree in Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences and Mathematics. She followed this up by enrolling in the Cognitive Science master's program at Ecole Normale Supérieure - PSL, where she graduated in 2022. Her interests are at the intersection of numerical cognition with the semantics and pragmatics of numbers and quantifiers.

Ridvan joined the GRISP during the academic year 2022-2023 as a second year master’s student working on a project on Attentional Blink. He investigated the structural processing of natural language on early stages of visual cognition and the role of structural saliency on conscious and unconscious perception by employing behavioral and electrophysiological measures in reduced awareness. Ridvan is now enrolled in a PhD program under the supervision of Laurent Koessler at the IMoPA (Ingénierie Moléculaire et Physiopathologie Articulaire), Université de Lorraine. He is preparing a thesis titled : "Neural basis of visual attention and its modulation of visual perception".

Anouk was a postdoctoral researcher (2021-2023) at the Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle, working on a project on the acquisition of modals in French funded by the Fyssen foundation. She did her PhD at the University of Maryland in the US, with Valentine Hacquard and Alexander Williams. She was part of the project Acquiring the language of possibility. Before that, she did my master at the CogMaster in Paris, where she was working with Benjamin Spector and Emmanuel Chemla, and she was a Course Lecturer at McGill University in Montréal for one year. Anouk is now a postdoc in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Geneva, working with Isabelle Charnavel on her project on bound indexicals.

Morgan was a postdoc (2021-2023) at the LLF working with Ira and Cecile on the pragmatics of discourse connectives. Before that, she was a postdoc with Judith Degen at Stanford ALPS lab doing corpus experimental research on (non-)exhaustivity in wh-questions. She completed my PhD at Rutgers in 2020 on the pragmatics of (non-)exaustivity, supervised by Kristen Syrett. Morgan is currently a post-doc at the Sorbonne, jointly supervised by Anouch Bourmayan (Sorbonne), Isidora Stojanovic (Institut Jean Nicod, ENS / EHESS / CNRS), and Brent Strickland (Institut Jean Nicod, ENS / EHESS / CNRS).

Nicolas is a speech and language therapist working in Lyon at the Hospital Le Vinatier. He completed his PhD in 2023. His research interests focus on pragmatic abilities in typical development and in neurodeveppmental disorders. His PhD project aimed to develop an assesment tool for pragmatic inferences in school-aged children, and was supervised by Ira Noveck at the LLF and Jérome Prado at the CRNL (Lyon). He also teaches at the speech-language therapy department of the Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1.