Professor Hannah Rohde Inaugural Lecture Hannah Rohde Inaugural Lecture - "Why am I saying this? Recovery and anticipation of meaning in language processing" Abstract: For a conversation to be coherent, we expect more than just a sequence of arbitrary sentences—we expect the sentences to connect in predictable and sensible ways. At the same time, if everything a speaker said were entirely predictable, there’d be no new information conveyed. These two expectations—one for coherence, one for informativity—underlie cooperative communication.In this lecture, I’ll present a series of psycholinguistic studies that test how these expectations influence language processing. Rather than comprehension unfolding in a purely bottom-up fashion—where sounds combine to form words, words combine to form sentences, and only then do we react to coherence and content—it turns out that we use broader context from the very start. Discourse-level pragmatic considerations influence language processing pervasively, from the sounds we think we hear to the words we anticipate and the way we derive syntactic structure.These findings also raise broader questions about how we (or machines) learn about the world from the language we encounter. If speakers prioritise informativity by highlighting what is unpredictable in a situation, language might seem to give us a skewed picture of what’s typical in the world. For language to be effective, speakers and listeners must be attuned to the pragmatic pressures behind why someone is speaking and what they might be trying to say. Apr 23 2025 17.30 - 19.00 Professor Hannah Rohde Inaugural Lecture "Why am I saying this? Recovery and anticipation of meaning in language processing" G.03, 50 George Square, Newington, Edinburgh EH8 9JU, UK
Professor Hannah Rohde Inaugural Lecture Hannah Rohde Inaugural Lecture - "Why am I saying this? Recovery and anticipation of meaning in language processing" Abstract: For a conversation to be coherent, we expect more than just a sequence of arbitrary sentences—we expect the sentences to connect in predictable and sensible ways. At the same time, if everything a speaker said were entirely predictable, there’d be no new information conveyed. These two expectations—one for coherence, one for informativity—underlie cooperative communication.In this lecture, I’ll present a series of psycholinguistic studies that test how these expectations influence language processing. Rather than comprehension unfolding in a purely bottom-up fashion—where sounds combine to form words, words combine to form sentences, and only then do we react to coherence and content—it turns out that we use broader context from the very start. Discourse-level pragmatic considerations influence language processing pervasively, from the sounds we think we hear to the words we anticipate and the way we derive syntactic structure.These findings also raise broader questions about how we (or machines) learn about the world from the language we encounter. If speakers prioritise informativity by highlighting what is unpredictable in a situation, language might seem to give us a skewed picture of what’s typical in the world. For language to be effective, speakers and listeners must be attuned to the pragmatic pressures behind why someone is speaking and what they might be trying to say. Apr 23 2025 17.30 - 19.00 Professor Hannah Rohde Inaugural Lecture "Why am I saying this? Recovery and anticipation of meaning in language processing" G.03, 50 George Square, Newington, Edinburgh EH8 9JU, UK
Apr 23 2025 17.30 - 19.00 Professor Hannah Rohde Inaugural Lecture "Why am I saying this? Recovery and anticipation of meaning in language processing"
