About me

I’m Espe (she/her), a PhD student in Psycholinguistics at the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences (UoE, UK). I am pretty much interested in anything (and I could just leave it there), but I can usually be found thinking about paralinguistic cues, social cognition, and pragmatics. In my thesis, I am exploring (with the great help of my supervisors, Martin Corley and Hannah Rohde) the biases elicited by filled pauses (uh or um, for example) at the lexical and pragmatic level, with a focus on the timecourse of the integration of these biases. What makes someone expect me or not to say accordion (but not train) when I am disfluent? Would they also use my hesitation to infer that I am lying? I am currently also working on a SGSSS-funded project looking at the processing of the discourse marker ‘er’ in Dutch with Rob Hartsuiker.

Among the other things that do not let me sleep at night are the differences between written and spoken disfluencies, the inferences we make about the speaker when processing speech, lexical choices, the effects of accent on comprehension and interpretation; basically, how do we manage to comprehend one another (especially when speaking!) with all this information. I’m always happy to talk about these and other ideas, so drop me a line if they also keep you awake at night.

I enjoy coding, teaching, and their intersection. I usually work on Python and R for my research, and share my materials, code and results on OSF for transparency. Likewise, I really like talking and learning about stats, and I usually fall down these rabbit holes when doing research.

On the side, I co-organise the Psycholinguistics Coffee with Greta Gandolfi. Given that to do science is to be a social actor engaged, whether one likes it or not, in political activity (Lewontin, 1985), I also spend my time trying to improve the spaces where we work and how we work. For example, Greta¹ and I are currently organising an event to bring together ECR and PGT working on Psycholinguistics to create a space for all of us to discuss research, and share our experiences and knowledge on building a career in Academia and how to improve our work and how we conduct it (you can check it out here).