Research Interests and Current Studies

Ambiguity, Polysemous words and copredication

Many words have different related meanings. For example, the word newspaper does not only refer to the physical paper that contains news, but also to the institution and even maybe to the building of the institution. Words that have several related senses are called polysemous.

A big part of my work has consisted of studying theories on polysemy and explanations of how and why sometimes we use more than one meaning of the same word at the same time.

Communal lexicons and common ground

Each community of people—whether it's a profession, or a hobby, etc—has its own shared vocabulary, called a communal lexicon. These are words that may be known by members of the same group but might be unfamiliar to others.

For example, a mechanic talking to another mechanic might say "the alternator isn’t charging properly." But if they’re explaining the problem to a customer, they might just say "your car’s battery isn’t getting power."

We are studing how speakers change the words they use based on what they think the other person knows.

previous experience with word-meaning AND THE IDENTITY OF THE SPEAKER

Hearing one word-meaning of an ambiguous word can influence what we think about when we hear the same words later. This is known as word-meaning priming. For example, if you watch a documentary about the animal bat, later when you hear the word bat, you’re more likely to picture the animal instead of a baseball bat. Now, imagine that a baseball player says the word bat after you watched the documentary, would you still think of the animal? We’re investigating whether word-meaning priming is specific to the speaker’s identity and to the community of the speaker.

Speech injustice in development

I am very interested in the concept of speech injustice, which occurs when a speaker's social position—like their gender, race, or age— overrides the impact of what they're trying to say. This means that what the speaker says doesn't have the effect they intended. A common example of speech injustice is when a woman says she doesn't want to do something, but people interpret it as her actually wanting to do it.

We're investigating whether preadolescents and adolescents engage in speech injustice. We also want to see if there's a link between speech injustice, gender stereotypes and epistemic authority.

previous experience with word-meaning in OVERHEARING CONTEXTS

Children sometimes pick up information and words just by listening to conversations around them. For example, if a child hears adults talking about “photosynthesis” while playing nearby, they might start to understand what that word means. We aim to study whether children remember the meanings of words when they hear them in overhearing contexts compared to when they heard them in direct speech contexts or watching a video.

collaborations

Gender and Language

I am lucky to collaborate with Laura Vela-Plo and Marta de Pedis in a project about the use of different grammatical representations of gender in Spanish and Basque. You can find more information about the project here.

Semantic representation of metaphorical polysemy in autistic adults

I am part of a collaborative project with Isabel Martín and Agustín Vicente, where we explore how senses of conventional metaphors are represented in autistic and non-autistic adults.

Cross-linguistic transfer of informativeness biases in the kinship domain

Different languages organize words differently, creating “semantic accents” in multilingual people. For example, Hindi distinguishes “older sister” (didi) from “younger sister” (behen), while Spanish and English do not. I collaborate in a project, where Nina Schöener (and other collaborators) look at whether these native language habits affect word choice in a second language and whether these linguistic differences can be partly explained in terms of communicative need of a word for a certain speech community. For example, in a community where it is commonly relevant to talk about the age of sisters, saying "older sister" (or didi) and "younger sister" (or behen) is more informative than simply saying "sister," and this informativiness satisfies the communicative needs of the community. In contrast, in a community where age is rarely relevant when talking about siblings, distinguishing between "older sister" and "younger sister" might be more informative, but it may not be necessary to fulfill the community’s communicative needs.

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