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Abstract
The structure of the mental lexicon is still not fully understood in psycholinguistics, with debates about whether we store fully detailed word representations or minimal ones enriched by context. Research on polysemous words like "school" and "Vietnam" suggests that word meanings may be underspecified and clarified in context. While this has been tested primarily with nouns, the case of maximum standard absolute adjectives (MSAAs) like "straight" offers another perspective. MSAAs, considered semantically precise (e.g., "perfectly straight"), are often used imprecisely in casual contexts (e.g., "straight enough"). One hypothesis is that this imprecision is not a pragmatic adjustment but due to underspecified representations of precision in the mental lexicon. Two experiments using pupillometry tested this by analyzing how participants processed precise versus imprecise interpretations of MSAAs in different contexts. The first experiment found that imprecise interpretations led to increased processing effort (measured by pupil dilation). The second experiment did not, however, find the same results. The overall findings suggest that MSAAs are stored with precise meanings, and imprecise interpretations require additional cognitive effort, contradicting the idea of underspecification.
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About the speaker
Camilo is a post-doctoral researcher at UiO working in Experimental Pragmatics. He is interested in exploring the links between theoretical and empirical work for pragmatic phenomena such as metaphor, irony, imprecision, expressives, among others.