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91���� Marion Professor of Psychology, Nikole Patson was recently awarded an Undergraduate Research Access Innovation Seed Grant in the amount $10,000 by 91���� Office of Academic of Academic Enrichment Undergraduate Research & Creative Inquiry.

According to Patson, the grant will fund research stipends for 4 undergraduate students to conduct research over the next year or two.

The goal of the research, said Patson is, “To find out if the inferences people make while understanding language are remembered over time.”

“When we talk, we often expect others to "fill in the gaps" and understand what we mean, even if we don't say everything explicitly,” said Patson. “But we don't know if these inferences actually help people remember the message correctly later on. Knowing this is important because we want to ensure that our listeners understand and remember what we intended to communicate,” Patson explained.

“In conversations, speakers often leave parts of their message unsaid, expecting listeners to infer the intended meaning. Listeners can deduce a speaker’s implicit meaning by considering what the speaker could have said but didn’t. These unspoken alternatives enrich the sentence’s meaning. Language offers various tools, such as changes in prosody, focus particles, clefts, and scalar items, to signal when such enrichment should occur,” said Patson. 

“Research shows that these markers quickly activate alternatives and influence initial language processing. However, it is less clear how these alternatives are integrated into long-term memory,” she concluded. 

“Previous studies have found that only explicitly mentioned alternatives are retained in long-term memory.” (Fraundorf, Benjamin, & Watson, 2013; Fraundorf, Watson, & Benjamin, 2010),” Patson added. 

Patson shared that, this study aims to explore scalar implicatures, a different type of alternative construction, to understand how implicitly available scalar alternatives are encoded in listeners’ meaning representations.