Program and abstracts will follow!

Registration: https://forms.gle/WjiEL1MdMkttSotC8

Speakers and discussants:

Vera Demberg (Universität des Saarlandes)

Robert Fiorentino (University of Kansas)

Juhani Järvikivi (University of Alberta)

Napoleon Katsos (University of Cambridge)

Danielle Matthews (University of Sheffield)

María Piñango (Yale University)

Paula Rubio-Fernández (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen)

Bob van Tiel (Radboud University)

 

Abstract:

Pragmatic processing plays a central role in how speakers and hearers arrive at intended meanings in context. In everyday communication, language users routinely infer speakers’ intentions, resolve underspecification, enrich meanings, align perspectives, and negotiate common ground. These processes are not only fundamental to successful interaction, but also underpin broader patterns of linguistic variation.

While pragmatic mechanisms have been studied extensively, much less attention has been paid to the fact that pragmatic processing is not uniform across individuals or across developmental and experiential trajectories. Experimental work in psycholinguistics, cognitive science, and experimental pragmatics increasingly documents substantial and systematic individual differences in phenomena such as implicature derivation, presupposition accommodation, reference resolution, context updating, and adaptation to interlocutors. These differences have been linked to a range of cognitive and psychological factors, including working memory, attention, executive control, theory of mind, learning biases, processing speed, and personality traits.

The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers from different theoretical and methodological backgrounds to explore the nature, sources, and consequences of individual differences in pragmatic processing. A central motivation is to understand how such differences shape synchronic variation in interpretation and use, and how they may, under certain conditions, feed into processes of semantic reanalysis and change.

By fostering dialogue across experimental, theoretical, and computational approaches, the workshop seeks to critically assess the empirical reality, explanatory role, and methodological tractability of pragmatic processing variability across individuals.

We are particularly interested in the following questions:

• Where do individual differences matter in pragmatic processing?

Which pragmatic phenomena show robust between-speaker variation (e.g., scalar implicatures, presupposition accommodation, pragmatic strengthening, metaphor and metonymy, vagueness resolution, perspective alignment)?

• What are the cognitive and psychological sources of pragmatic variability?

How do memory, attention, executive functions, social cognition, learning biases, personality traits, or their interactions contribute? Are differences best understood as stable traits, context-sensitive strategies, or both?

• How does pragmatic heterogeneity relate to synchronic variation?

Can we track systematic links between individual profiles and patterns of interpretation and use, including the emergence and maintenance of competing meanings?

• What are the implications for semantic change?

Do some individuals function as innovators or early adopters of pragmatic enrichments? Under what conditions do individual-level biases scale up to community-level conventionalization processes?

• How can individual differences in pragmatic processing be operationalized experimentally?

Which paradigms (e.g., referential communication tasks, contextualized inference tasks, artificial language learning, iterated learning) are best suited to uncovering variability?

• How do pragmatic profiles develop across childhood and adolescence? 

Which cognitive and social factors promote or constrain the emergence of adult-like pragmatic strategies in early childhood? Do early pragmatic preferences forecast later sensitivity to pragmatic enrichments that can conventionalize?

• How do exposure and interaction shape pragmatic profiles?

To what extent is pragmatic processing plastic across time or experience? What roles do social networks, accommodation, and alignment play in amplifying or dampening individual differences?