MARION, OH (MARION COUNTY NOW)—Nikole Patson, a Professor of Psychology at Ohio State Marion, has been awarded a $10,000 Undergraduate Research Access Innovation Seed Grant by The Ohio State University Office of Academic Enrichment Undergraduate Research & Creative Inquiry.
According to Patson, the grant will fund research stipends for four undergraduate students to conduct research over the next year or two. The goal of the research, she said, is “to find out if the inferences people make while understanding language are remembered over time.”
“When we talk, we often expect others to ‘fill in the gaps’ and understand what we mean, even if we don’t say everything explicitly,” Patson explained. “But we don’t know if these inferences actually help people remember the message correctly later on. Knowing this is important because we want to ensure that our listeners understand and remember what we intended to communicate.”
Patson elaborated on the nuances of language comprehension, stating, “In conversations, speakers often leave parts of their message unsaid, expecting listeners to infer the intended meaning. Listeners can deduce a speaker’s implicit meaning by considering what the speaker could have said but didn’t. These unspoken alternatives enrich the sentence’s meaning. Language offers various tools, such as changes in prosody, focus particles, clefts, and scalar items, to signal when such enrichment should occur.”
She noted that while research shows these markers quickly activate alternatives and influence initial language processing, it is less clear how these alternatives are integrated into long-term memory. “Previous studies have found that only explicitly mentioned alternatives are retained in long-term memory,” Patson added, referencing work by Fraundorf, Benjamin, and Watson (2013) and Fraundorf, Watson, and Benjamin (2010).
Patson shared that this study aims to explore scalar implicatures, a different type of alternative construction, to understand how implicitly available scalar alternatives are encoded in listeners’ meaning representations.
The research funded by this grant will provide valuable insights into the cognitive processes involved in language comprehension and memory, potentially impacting educational strategies and communication practices.