37.1163, Confs: Individual Differences in Pragmatic Processing (Germany)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-1163. Fri Mar 20 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.1163, Confs: Individual Differences in Pragmatic Processing (Germany)

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Date: 20-Mar-2026
From: Martín Fuchs [m.fuchs at fu-berlin.de]
Subject: Individual Differences in Pragmatic Processing


Individual Differences in Pragmatic Processing

Date: 10-Sep-2026 - 11-Sep-2026
Location: Berlin, Germany
Contact: Martín Fuchs
Contact Email: m.fuchs at fu-berlin.de
Meeting URL:
https://www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/en/v/exrean/news/Workshop3-Individual-Differences-in-Pragmatic-Processing.html

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; Language Acquisition;
Pragmatics; Psycholinguistics; Semantics

We are delighted to invite you to attend the third workshop of the
EXREAN project* at Freie Universität Berlin, focusing on individual
differences in pragmatic processing.
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?
Confirmed Speakers:
- 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)
Registration (free; open until 6 September 2026):
https://forms.gle/WjiEL1MdMkttSotC8
Location: Room L116 (Seminarzentrum), Freie Universität Berlin,
Otto-von Simson-Str. 26
*The EXREAN project investigates how historically attested reanalysis
processes can be replicated experimentally in laboratory settings,
using methods from natural language comprehension and artificial
language learning across typologically diverse languages.
(https://www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/en/v/exrean/index.html).



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LINGUIST List: Vol-37-1163
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