What are you going to work with at IFIKK?
I’m affiliated with two projects at IFIKK - Creativity and Convention in Pragmatic Development, and DEVCOM - both of which investigate different aspects of non-literal language comprehension in children. Specifically, my work will focus on the relationship between syntactic class (e.g. nouns/verbs) and meaning. It’s an open question whether we actually store words as ‘verbs’ and ‘nouns’ in our mental lexicon, or if they only get classed as such once they’re placed into a grammatical context. I’m hoping to shed light on that question by looking at whether certain processing differences between nouns and verbs, as already found in adults, can also be replicated in children.
Can you tell us a bit about your research interests?
I’m interested in this idea of ‘meaning’, and how it relates both to interlocutors and to communities. Who gets to decide what something means, or how words are used? Is it the speaker who uses a word, or the language community / world they exist in; or perhaps it’s a conversation between multiple levels of context? How do other conditions in our worlds - our emotions, our beliefs about other people and things - affect the way we interpret each other? With a background in pedagogy and community action, I like to see questions like this as necessary cognitive groundwork for applied linguistics.
What do you like to do in your spare time?
99% of my free time is currently getting ready for a baby! But interests include: eco- and anarchist theory; hxcore, rave and generally cathartic music; Liverpool FC; Pokémon; our cat Sucha who I am sure is also a Pokémon, specifically a lvl. 27 sneasel.