Paul Stott

About Me

I am an ESRC-funded PhD researcher in Linguistics and a Graduate Teaching Assistant in Linguistics and Psychology at The University of Manchester (UK), where I am also the Lab Manager of the Psycholinguistics Lab. I am Supervised by Dr. Vera Hohaus and Prof. Andrew Stewart.

Broadly speaking, I'm interested in the way in which people get meaning when they read. My work falls into two main strands:

1. The use of behavioural methods like semantic priming, eye-tracking and reading time measures to 'get at' some of the hidden semantic processes that are at play when we read.


2. Developing, and building on existing, models that capture theoretically relevant insights from formal semantics while providing a plausible mechanistic processing model based on experimental data.

More specifically, I'm interested in quantification. For instance, when we read sentences such as every cyclist ignored the warnings, how (and when) do we combine the meanings of every cyclist and ignored the warnings to give us the full meaning of the sentence? While this may seem trivial to native speakers, it is largely an open question as to how this happens on a word-by-word basis.

To find out more about me, take a look at my CV or my Slides & Posters. You may also be interested in my Free Materials.

Slides & Posters

Below, you'll find links to some slides and posters presented at conferences/workshops:

• VP-Internal Subjects and Incremental Processing
• Extraposed Subject Relatives (ESRs) in English: A Leftward Movement Analysis
• Investigating the processing of sentences with definite subject NPs (DNPs) and quantificational subject NPs (QNPs): evidence from priming during self-paced reading
• What the hell questions (WTH-Qs) in English
• Contextual Quantifier Domain Restriction (CDR) in Ambiguous Linguistic Contexts
• Quantifier domain restriction can remain underspecified in ambiguous linguistic contexts

Free Materials

Below, you'll find links to a set of resources on some topics in formal semantics, psycholinguistics, and data science in R.

1. Formal Semantics 101
2. Sentence Processing 101
3. Analysing Psycholinguistic Data in R
4. Quantifiers in Semantics and Psycholinguistics
5. Type-setting your first page in

Contact Me

Elements

i = 0;

while (!deck.isInOrder()) {
    print 'Iteration ' + i;
    deck.shuffle();
    i++;
}

print 'It took ' + i + ' iterations to sort the deck.';