What are you going to work with at IFIKK?
I am going to be working on how children's understanding of contextually adjusted words develops over time. Specifically, I will be investigating how (and when) children learn to understand adjectives such as 'full' or 'empty' imprecisely, i.e. when they mean 'almost full' or 'somewhat empty', as well as adjectives used metaphorically, such as 'sad' in the sentence 'the flower is sad'. This will be done as part of the broader ERC-funded project DEVCOM led by Ingrid Lossius Falkum.
Can you tell us a bit about your research interests?
I am interested in understanding how people use and understand language in context. I am particularly drawn to language phenomena which seem hard to capture by formal semantic and pragmatic theories, such as irony, metaphor and ad-hoc implicatures. For example, I find it fascinating to think about why it is that we can hear someone call an old, broken-down dirty car 'a beauty' and understand exactly what is meant even if we have never heard this expression before. What allows us to understand ironic remarks like this? What are the necessary cognitive mechanisms, and what type of mental representations are created? I use experimental methods, such as eye-tracking, mouse tracking and reading times to try to answer these questions.
What do you like to do in your spare time?
I enjoy playing the electric bass, salsa dancing, cooking, reading, and watching RuPaul's Drag Race. I'm Looking forward to finding a band to play with in Oslo!