Cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics

Explore LALS research into the connections between language, cognition and behaviour.

Cognitive Linguistics

At its core, cognitive linguistics research investigates the interdependency between cognition and language. In LALS, our researchers draw from cognitive linguistics to study a range of different topics, such as the how formulaic language reflects the organisation of language in the mind. Along the same lines, our researchers also investigate how speakers make pragmatic and discourse-level inferences from figurative and humorous language. Other research in the school is devoted to exploring how the intersection of syntax and semantics contributes to conceptual knowledge among speakers of different languages, and how this knowledge may transfer when learning a new language.

Active research projects in this area

  • Conceptual transfer of spatiotemporal concepts among speakers of English, Mandarin Chinese, and Indonesian
  • Crosslinguistic transfer of abstract syntactic patterns among speakers of English, Mandarin Chinese, and Japanese
  • Cognitive processing and comprehension of humorous and ironic (satirical) discourse
  • Computational analyses of linguistic patterns associated with humorous and figurative language
  • Representation and processing of figurative and literal formulaic language in children and adults
  • Crosslinguistic transfer in formulaic language processing in Chinese-English bilinguals

Researchers able to supervise in this area

Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics is the study of the mental representations and processes used in the production and comprehension of language.

Active and recent research projects in this area

  • How iconic, or ‘biological’, meanings of voice pitch interact with social uses of pitch in perception
  • How prosodic cues are used to track important information in speech, and how this affects interpretation, across languages
  • Production and perception of sound change in language (for example, the merger of the EAR and AIR vowels in NZ English)
  • The on-line processing of formulaic language by first and second language speakers (in particular, English, Chinese and Italian) using behavioural and eye-tracking methodologies
  • The processing of formulaic language in individuals with developmental dyslexia
  • The prosody of formulaic language
  • The on-line processing of gender stereotypes by children, adults, and the elderly, using behavioural methodologies
  • The use of prosodic information in the resolution of sentence ambiguity
  • Investigation of the psycholinguistic aspects of morphological productivity
  • Acquisition and processing of meanings of ambiguous word in the first and second language
  • Reading comprehension and related skills in English as a first and second language

Researchers able to supervise in this area

  • Anna Siyanova (especially in the area of the psycholinguistics of formulaic language)
  • Irina Elgort (word representation, processing, and acquisition)
  • Sasha Calhoun (spoken language processing, especially prosody)