Welcome

Directed by Asst. Prof. Emilie Destruel Johnson, MAIA Lab conducts research that deals with pragmatics and its interface with semantics, syntax and prosody, both in native speakers and second language learners.
Some of our core questions examine:

how pragmatic inferences are conveyed, interpreted and processed during communication, and how the findings relate to theoretical approaches of these inferences;
the role of information structure and particular discourse cues on the production of (non)-canonical forms.
how L2 learners understand and process non-literal aspects of meaning in a second language.

To address these issues, we use linguistic analysis and a variety of experimental methods, including acceptability judgment tasks, elicitation tasks, self-paced readings tasks, and reading and response time measurements.