Professor Hannah Rohde
Sabbatical Fellow, March - June 2024
Home Institution: University of Edinburgh
Hannah Rohde is a Professor in Linguistics & English Language at the University of Edinburgh. She works in the area of experimental pragmatics, using psycholinguistic methods to investigate questions about how speakers formulate their messages and how listeners draw inferences from what they hear. Her work focuses on aspects of communication such as ambiguity, redundancy, deception, and the establishment of discourse coherence. Her background includes an undergraduate degree in Computer Science & Linguistics from Brown University, followed by a PhD in Linguistics at the University of California San Diego, with postdoctoral fellowships at Northwestern and Stanford. Broadly, her work emphasizes the value of studying human language through the lens of computational models of information transfer and game-theoretic models of cooperative interaction. More specifically, she studies phenomena like referring expression generation and implicature, domains encompassing the often unspoken meanings that underlie coherent conversation. The premise of her work in these areas is that interlocutors not only establish these links retroactively but that they also use cues to anticipate where a discourse is going and what questions upcoming sentences are likely to answer. She is a recipient of the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Languages and Literatures.
Project title: Expectations for informativity in language
The aim of this project is to link existing work on linguistic informativity to the acquisition and perpetuation of implicit biases and stereotypes. My current research on informativity-driven language processing highlights the (perhaps unintuitive) observation that the language we hear often does not describe the world as it is normally; specifically, speakers tend to omit information that is inferable (e.g., train stations have trains) and instead they often use language to mention the atypical newsworthy properties of situations that they encounter (a train station with a juggling street-perfomer). These patterns of omission/mention raise a puzzle for human (and machine) learners as they attempt to figure out how the world works from what people say about it. Initial steps in this project will target the developmental trajectory of children’s awareness of linguistic informativity. This work is related to the perpetuation of stereotypes and gender biases – e.g., When a child hears “Look! A woman bus driver!”, how does their pragmatic reasoning and their understanding of cooperative interaction influence how they interpret the utterance (as a simple fact that there exists a woman bus driver nearby or as a message that such a situation is atypical because the speaker deemed it newsworthy enough to merit commentary)?