Our interest group was founded in 2023 by Clare Patterson, Marian Marchal, and Vinicius Macuch Silva.
Clare Patterson
I’m a postdoctoral researcher at the CRC Prominence in Language in Cologne, Germany. My research interests are in the processing of sentence and discourse-level phenomena related to coherence such as anaphora and discourse connectives. I’ve used offline and online experimental methods, including self-paced reading and eye-tracking, to investigate various aspects of anaphora resolution both in first-language users and in adult second-language learners. I’m also interested in how our findings can be modelled using Bayesian frameworks, how we can investigate other discourse-level phenomena using more naturalistic experimental paradigms, and how to combine these with corpus and modelling approaches.
Marian Marchal
I’m a PhD student at Saarland University in Vera Demberg’s lab. My work focuses on the role of relational and contextual cues in processing discourse relations, but I am interested in anything remotely related to this. In my research, I often combine various psycholinguistic tasks (e.g. self-paced reading, comprehension) to test my hypotheses. These hypotheses are often inspired by corpus research and cognitive models of language processing.
Vinicius Macuch Silva
I’m a post-doctoral researcher working with Bodo Winter at the Department of English Language and Linguistics, University of Birmingham.
I’m interested in how people use language to create meaning in communication, both when interacting with others and when producing and interpreting language in various other settings. In my research I use primarily quantitative empirical methods, including controlled experimentation as well as computational and corpus analysis, to investigate issues related to pragmatic inferencing, strategic communication, argumentation and stance-taking, as well as expressive and affective meaning.