Research
Dr Jessica Brough
When it comes to academia, I tend to use my full name and my title. During my Masters and my PhD, I studied descriptions of interactions at the University of Edinburgh. My research interests include social biases of mention order, perceptions of agency, animacy and social robotics. During my PhD, I received supervision from Prof Hugh Rabagliati and Prof Holly Branigan at UoE and Prof Lasana Harris at UCL.
Papers from my PhD thesis will be coming soon, but in the meantime you can find me and my pre-registrations on the Open Science Forum.
Images: NAO © SoftBanks Robotics, Lego © Lego Bionicle
Research areas
Mention order
What can first mention, the entity mentioned first in an utterance, tell us about group identification, self-other equivalences and assumptions of agency? In the field of psycholinguistics, language is not routinely studied in relation to social identity or social contexts. Yet, language is a fundamental social behaviour that is often influenced by culture and society. Through a series of production experiments, my thesis showed that a speaker who is describing an interaction such as a hug taking place between someone from their ingroup and someone from their outgroup will demonstrate a tendency to mention the ingroup member first.
Judgements of agency
Who a listener hears first in an utterance influences semantic inferences. In addition to studying mention order in language production, my thesis also investigated the effects of mention order on judgements of agency. If you hear “Kate is hugging Beth”, who do you suspect instigated the hug? First-mention agency biases have important implications for how we conceptualise a host of behaviours, including responsibility, victimhood and aggression.
Animacy
Animacy is a multi-faceted concept, distinguishing humans from other living things, and living things from inanimate objects or concepts. In my thesis, I explored what makes an entity animate, and how flexible (or inflexible) this qualifier can be, using theories such as conceptual accessibility and mind perception to inform my work. I studied how perceptions of animacy influence descriptions of interactions between a more animate and a less animate entity, pairing humans with social robots and manipulating how speakers perceive their relative humanness.
My PhD was supervised by Prof. Hugh Rabagliati, Prof. Holly Branigan and Prof. Lasana Harris.
Conferences and Publications
Brough, J., Harris, L. T., Wu, S. H., Branigan, H. P., Rabagliati, H. (2023). Accessibility and incrementality cause “Like Me” race and gender biases in human language production. (Paper Under Review).
Brough, J., Harris, L. T., Branigan, H. P., Cross, E. S., Henschel, A., Rabagliati, H. (2022). Aye, Robot: Using narrative to manipulate the animacy bias for human/robot interactions. Talk presented at the 2022 EASP Meeting on Dehumanisation.
Brough, J., Branigan, H. P., Harris, L. T., Rabagliati, H. (2020). The influence of race and gender on perspective-taking during language production. Poster session presented at AMLaP 2020, Online.
Brough, J., Branigan, H. P., Gambi, C., Rabagliati, H. (2018). Incremental strategies in children’s language production: Evidence from eye-gaze. Talk presented at the 43rd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston University, Massachusetts.
Brough, J., Branigan, H. P., Gambi, C., Rabagliati, H. (2018). An eye-tracking experiment to investigate on-line sentence planning in adults and children. Poster session presented at AMLaP 2018, Berlin, Germany.
Brough, J. (2017). Predicting word order and linguistic biases: evidence from eye-tracking. Talk presented at PsyPAG 2017, Northumbria University, Newcastle.
Brough, J. (2016). Teaching verbs through child-directed speech: are mothers doing it right? Poster presented at the BPS South West Undergraduate Conference, UWE, Bristol.