As a group of researchers with intersecting interests, we’ve got a lot going on! This page describes just a few of the areas we work on. See our brief descriptions and individual pages for more information.

Viewpoint/Perspective

The encoding of viewpoint in multimodal language (speech and gesture)
The management of perspective in written narratives and film
Perspective blends and grammar
Autism and linguistic perspective

Multimodal communication

Experimental studies of gesture as part of the same system that gives rise to spoken language
Looking at writing and literacy as linguistic phenomena that co-occur with speech, not just as substitutes for speech
Computational studies of large multimodal corpora (in collaboration with the Red Hen lab).

Decision making and language

How biases in perspective taking are reflected in linguistic behavior
Conceptual blends in negotiation and related conversation settings

 

Learn more about us

Fey Parrill, Director
Fey Parrill studies the psychological processes involved in producing and understanding language, with a focus on gestures produced when people are talking. Visit her individual page for more detail.

Todd Oakley
Todd Oakley studies cognitive linguistics, semiotics, discourse analysis, and rhetoric. Visit his individual page for more detail.

Vera Tobin
Vera Tobin studies social cognition, viewpoint, joint attention, cognitive biases, and cognitive approaches to language and literature. Visit her individual page for more detail.

Mark Turner
Mark Turner studies the nature and emergence of higher-order cognitive operations that distinguish human beings from other species and appear in the record of our descent during the Upper Paleolithic Visit his individual website for more detail.