Before I properly complete this page, you can check my Google Scholar profile.
Here is a list of my publications, sorted by year, last updated in March 2025.
Shared Mechanisms in Pragmatic Enrichment with Contextual and Lexical Alternatives
With Bade, Nadine and Chung, WooJin and Dudley, Rachel and Mascarenhas, Salvador
In Journal of Memory and Language
We explore the role of contextual versus lexical alternatives in pragmatic strengthening using a novel trainingwith-feedback paradigm. In two experiments, we investigate whether training with inferences over contextual alternatives affects pragmatic strengthening with lexical alternatives, and the other way around. In both Experiments, we find that training that encouraged (or discouraged) pragmatic strengthening of simple disjunctions carried over to complex disjunctions of an unfamiliar kind to our experimental participants. This shows that our novel methodology is effective in training general mechanisms for activating alternatives. In Experiment 2, we showed that this methodology can be made to work across different kinds of alternatives, if certain salience conditions are met.
On the Interplay Between Interpretation and Reasoning in Compelling Fallacies
With Mascarenhas, Salvador
In Cognitive Science
We investigate the articulation between domain-general reasoning and interpretive processes in failures of deductive reasoning. We focus on illusory inferences from disjunction-like elements, a broad class of deductive fallacies studied in some detail over the past 15 years. These fallacies have received accounts grounded in reasoning processes, holding that human reasoning diverges from normative standards. A subset of these fallacies, however, can be analyzed differently: human reasoning is not to blame, instead the premises were interpreted in a nonobvious, yet perfectly predictable and reasonable way. Once we consider these interpretations, the apparent fallacious conclusion is no mistake at all. We give a two-factor account of these fallacies that incorporates both reasoning-based elements and interpretive elements, showing that they are not in real competition. We present novel experimental evidence in favor of our theory. Cognitive load such as induced by a dual-task design is known to hinder the interpretive mechanisms at the core of interpretation-based accounts of the fallacies of interest. In the first experiment of its kind using this paradigm with an inferential task instead of a simpler truthvalue-judgment task, we found that the manipulation affected more strongly those illusions where our theory predicts that interpretive processes are at play. We conclude that the best way forward for the field to investigate the elusive line between reasoning and interpretation requires combining theories and methodologies from linguistic semantics and the psychology of reasoning.
Alternatives and Attention in Language and Reasoning: A Reply to Mascarenhas & Picat 2019
With Bade, Nadine and Chung, WooJin and Mascarenhas, Salvador
In Semantics and Pragmatics
In this paper, we employ an experimental paradigm using insights from the psychology of reasoning to investigate the question whether certain modals generate and draw attention to alternatives. The article extends and builds on the methodology and findings of Mascarenhas & Picat (2019). Based on experimental results, they argue that the English epistemic modal might raises alternatives. We apply the same methodology to the English modal allowed to to test different hypotheses regarding the involvement of alternatives in deontic modality. We find commonalities and differences between the two modals we tested. We discuss theoretical consequences for existing semantic analyses of these modals, and argue that reasoning tasks can serve as a diagnostic tool to discover which natural language expressions involve alternatives.
‘Might’ as a Generator of Alternatives: The View from Reasoning
With Mascarenhas, Salvador
In Semantics and Linguistic Theory
We argue that the epistemic modal ‘might’ is a generator of alternatives in the sense of Hamblin semantics (Kratzer & Shimoyama 2002) or inquisitive semantics (Ciardelli, Groenendijk & Roelofsen 2009). Building on methodologies from the psychology of reasoning, we show that ‘might’ patterns with disjunctions and with indefinites in giving rise to a particular kind of illusory inference. The best extant accounts of these illusory inferences crucially involve alternatives, paired with matching strategies (Walsh & Johnson-Laird 2004) or with question-answer dynamics (Koralus & Mascarenhas 2013). Our results constitute further steps toward convergence between theories and methodologies in natural language semantics and the psychology of reasoning.
Inferences with Disjunction, Interpretation or Reasoning
With only me
Master's thesis