How are linguistic content and contextual information integrated in language comprehension?

Professor Florian Schwarz is a linguist who studies how language is comprehended in context.

Some of the fundamental questions that Professor Schwarz is interested in include:

• What aspects of meaning are there, and what are their properties?
• How are different aspects of meaning combined into the overall conveyed meaning of an utterance?
• What mechanisms are there for establishing anaphoric reference?
• What is the role of situations – representing ways that parts of the world could be – in natural language interpretation?

Professor Schwarz studies how people understand language from both theoretical and experimental perspectives. He uses formal methods from semantics and pragmatics for modeling linguistic knowledge and its interaction with domain general reasoning, and various behavioral paradigms from psycholinguistics – including truth value judgment and picture selection tasks, response and reading times, and eye tracking in the visual world paradigm – to investigate language comprehension in context from both abstract and cognitive perspectives.

Professor Schwarz’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the European Science Foundation, XPRAG.de, and Penn’s University Research Foundation. He has been a Mercator Fellow, sponsored by a graduate school supported by the DFG (German Science Foundation) at the Goethe-University Frankfurt.