Are you interested in how people represent the word meaning? Are you curious about how individual differences affect linguistic communication? Do you have experience in combining computational cognitive modeling and psycholinguistic research? If you are excited about doing this kind of research in an interdisciplinary environment with a team of friendly and enthusiastic colleagues, then you may want to join us as a postdoctoral researcher in cognitive computational modeling of individual differences in semantic representations.
Human interaction involves processing many ‘vague expressions,’ such as quantifiers, adjectives, and generics. The meaning of these types of linguistic expressions is subject to variability. For example, the adjective ‘tall’ may mean different heights for different individuals. Successful communication, therefore, requires language users to flexibly adjust to the intended meaning scope of their interlocutors.
We seek a postdoctoral researcher for the project “Sharing vague meanings – from logical theories of meaning towards cognitive interactive models”. The project will study flexibility in processing vague linguistic expressions by taking an individual-differences approach. Specifically, we will investigate how personality traits, linguistic and general cognitive skills, jointly contribute to the successful production and comprehension of vague expressions during communication. For instance, how do they influence the time or the amount of communication it takes to adjust each other’s expectations?
Apply here.