•  1014
    Verbal irony in the wild
    Pragmatics and Cognition 19 (2): 291-309. 2011.
    Verbal irony constitutes a rough class of indirect intentional communication involving a complex interaction of language-specific and communication-general phenomena. Conversationalists use verbal irony in conjunction with paralinguistic signals such as speech prosody. Researchers examining acoustic features of speech communication usually focus on how prosodic information relates to the surface structure of utterances, and often ignore prosodic phenomena associated with implied meaning. In the …Read more
  •  49
    You don't say: Figurative language and thought
    with Raymond W. Gibbs
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25 (6): 678-679. 2002.
    Carruthers has proposed a novel and quite interesting hypothesis for the role of language in conceptual integration, but his treatment does not acknowledge work in cognitive science on metaphor and analogy that reveals how diverse knowledge structures are integrated. We claim that this body of research provides clear evidence that cross-domain conceptual connections cannot be driven by syntactic processes alone.
  •  45
    Music and dance as a coalition signaling system
    with Edward H. Hagen
    Human Nature 14 (1): 21-51. 2003.
    Evidence suggests that humans might have neurological specializations for music processing, but a compelling adaptationist account of music and dance is lacking. The sexual selection hypothesis cannot easily account for the widespread performance of music and dance in groups (especially synchronized performances), and the social bonding hypothesis has severe theoretical difficulties. Humans are unique among the primates in their ability to form cooperative alliances between groups in the absence…Read more
  •  22
    Striving for optimal relevance when answering questions
    with Raymond W. Gibbs
    Cognition 106 (1): 345-369. 2008.
    When people are asked “Do you have the time?” they can answer in a variety of ways, such as “It is almost 3”, “Yeah, it is quarter past two”, or more precisely as in “It is now 1:43”. We present the results of four experiments that examined people’s real-life answers to questions about the time. Our hypothesis, following previous research findings, was that people strive to make their answers optimally relevant for the addressee, which in many cases allows people to give rounded, and not exact, …Read more
  •  18
    Origins of music in credible signaling
    with Samuel A. Mehr, Max M. Krasnow, and Edward H. Hagen
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 44. 2021.
    Music comprises a diverse category of cognitive phenomena that likely represent both the effects of psychological adaptations that are specific to music (e.g., rhythmic entrainment) and the effects of adaptations for non-musical functions (e.g., auditory scene analysis). How did music evolve? Here, we show that prevailing views on the evolution of music – that music is a byproduct of other evolved faculties, evolved for social bonding, or evolved to signal mate quality – are incomplete or wrong.…Read more
  •  15
    Prosody in spontaneous humor: Evidence for encryption
    with Thomas Flamson and H. Clark Barrett
    Pragmatics and Cognition 19 (2): 248-267. 2011.
    The study of conversational humor has received relatively little empirical attention with almost no examinations of the role of vocal signals in spontaneous humor production. Here we report an analysis of spontaneous humorous speech in a rural Brazilian collective farm. The sample was collected over the course of ethnographic fieldwork in northeastern Brazil, and is drawn specifically from the monthly communal business meetings conducted in Portuguese. Our analyses focused on humorous utterances…Read more
  •  10
    The Evolution of Human Vocal Emotion
    Emotion Review 13 (1): 25-33. 2020.
    Vocal affect is a subcomponent of emotion programs that coordinate a variety of physiological and psychological systems. Emotional vocalizations comprise a suite of vocal behaviors shaped by evolution to solve adaptive social communication problems. The acoustic forms of vocal emotions are often explicable with reference to the communicative functions they serve. An adaptationist approach to vocal emotions requires that we distinguish between evolved signals and byproduct cues, and understand vo…Read more
  •  5
    Toward a productive evolutionary understanding of music
    with Samuel A. Mehr, Max M. Krasnow, and Edward H. Hagen
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 44. 2021.
    We discuss approaches to the study of the evolution of music (sect. R1); challenges to each of the two theories of the origins of music presented in the companion target articles (sect. R2); future directions for testing them (sect. R3); and priorities for better understanding the nature of music (sect. R4).
  •  3
    The evolution of coordinated vocalizations before language
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (6): 549-550. 2014.
    Ackermann et al. briefly point out the potential significance of coordinated vocal behavior in the dual pathway model of acoustic communication. Rhythmically entrained and articulated pre-linguistic vocal activity in early hominins might have set the evolutionary stage for later refinements that manifest in modern humans as language-based conversational turn-taking, joint music-making, and other behaviors associated with prosociality.
  •  2
    Signals and cues of social groups
    with Constance M. Bainbridge
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 45. 2022.
    A crucial factor in how we perceive social groups involves the signals and cues emitted by them. Groups signal various properties of their constitution through coordinated behaviors across sensory modalities, influencing receivers' judgments of the group and subsequent interactions. We argue that group communication is a necessary component of a comprehensive computational theory of social groups.
  • Recognizing Verbal Irony in Spontaneous Speech
    Metaphor and Symbol 17 (2): 99-119. 2002.
    We explored the differential impact of auditory information and written contextual information on the recognition of verbal irony in spontaneous speech. Based on relevance theory, we predicted that speakers would provide acoustic disambiguation cues when speaking in situations that lack other sources of information, such as a visual channel. We further predicted that listeners would use this information, in addition to context, when interpreting the utterances. People were presented with spontan…Read more