Latest projects

Finding affective meaning in prosody

This project examines the affective meanings assigned to utterances that are devoid of semantics. My goal is to uncover what inferences we "hear" when utterances are stripped of their lexical content.

The neurocognition of cooperation (with X. Jiang & M. D. Pell)

What are the neural responses to high vs. low cost demands? How does our brain respond to a polite or rude tone of voice? What is the degree of the listener's compliance? In this project, we used ERPs to capture the neural correlates of tactful and not so tactful requests (Vergis, Jiang & Pell, 2020).

Intonation and Implicature

How does question intonation affect the generation of implied meanings? Is the speaker seeking information or are they implicating criticism? In this project ("Components of Intonation and the Structure of Intonational Meaning"; Amalia Arvaniti (PI), Mary Baltazani & Stella Gryllia (Co-Is)), my role was to program and run experiments on PsyToolkit examining the effect of Greek question intonation on speaker meaning.

The acoustics of im/politeness (with J. Caballero, X. Jiang & M. D. Pell)

In this project, we investigated the acoustic correlates of im/polite prosody as realized in various linguistic structures. By taking both a 'global' and a 'local' view, we examined several acoustic parameters such as mean pitch, pitch contour, speech rate and voice quality, among others (Caballero, Vergis, Jiang & Pell, 2018).

Perspective taking and mixed messages

How easy is it to take the speaker's perspective when you are being teased? Participants in this experiment saw short stories describing everyday interactions, with the only difference that each read the stories taking a specific perspective (speaker, addressee or observer).

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