Speaking to Grigoroglou about her research these past few months, many incredible projects come to light. A more comprehensive list can be found linked below.
Read along to discover the impressive work being done by the Assistant Professor and her team.
Communication/development of pragmatic abilities: How children and adjust language to informational needs of listeners
In the field of linguistics and cognitive science, researchers are concerned with the different ways in which people describe events to a third party who cannot see them occurring.
Grigoroglou and her team probe this research, manipulating their experimental setup to get as much information out of the speaker as possible. Compiling this data, the team created a database comparing not only cross-linguistic data, but multi-modal signaling information.
For example, in Turkish, considered to be a more gestured language than, say, English, speakers were found to gesture much more when presented with a familiar listener.
Furthermore, the developmental component of this study, taking place in a naturalistic setting, is a novel one. Previously, studies mainly looked at the role of the addressee to examine how their involvement changed the speakers’ descriptions of events.
This was Grigoroglou's launching pad as well: they started with the assumption that visual perception of a listener would affect a speaker's informativeness. Though this was enough to increase responsiveness in adults, they didn’t see meaningful changes with children. Having a naïve listener, however, did affect communication.
In a step-wise approach, researchers manipulated the role of the listener, giving them more responsibility, a clear goal, and eventually interaction with the speaker. The most helpful listeners are, it turns out, naïve, familiar to the speaker, visible, and engaged.
Though interaction increases how informative the speaker will be, this goes both ways. Researchers found that even an assumption that the listener was distracted was enough to decrease the amount of information they were willing to give.
Being told by researchers that your listener is not paying attention, even if given visual or oral evidence to the contrary, is enough to shut down communication for most people.
Communication factors in use of spatial languages: Language to describe space
This branch of Grigoroglou's work studies language used to describe space, words such as in/on. The team realized that when making static descriptions, people don't use out/off as much as they use motion descriptions. For example, instead of "the cat was off the rug," people might say "the cat was next to the rug" - a description more closely aligned with motion.
Existing semantic theories say that these PPs (prepositional phrases) are ambiguous, and that motion PPs lie between static and motion prepositions. Analysis in the field currently says that out/off are infelicitous, needing context in static descriptions.
Grigoroglou and her team offer an alternative account: these are negative prepositions and have a negative meaning regardless of whether they are used in motion or static descriptions.
For something to come out of or off of means that means it was once in/on, and necessitates movement. Thus, in/out are complimentary antonyms existing in a relationship of entailment.
However, one of the most exciting aspects of this interview was discovering that, due to the similar spatial patterns of Turkish, French, and Greek, Grigoroglou's research results have universal validity.
Acquisition of logical language/logical cognition: How children acquire conditionals
While working as a postdoctoral researcher studying the expression of hypothetical language in children aged 3-6, Grigoroglou was meeting in person with the participants and their parents to gauge how information is presented to familiar vs. non-familiar listeners. However, when the pandemic hit, this research was moved online.
Trying to connect through Zoom, a new issue presented itself: a misalignment between the perspectives of speaker and listener, posing a newer, more intense need for information. Online data collection in this field reflects entirely different results than would appear in person.
Now, Grigoroglou is collecting child data from Turkish studies. This labor-intensive project, involving hundreds of hours of coding, is being completed by graduate students in Türkiye.
This procedure for measuring gesturing in Turkish involves multiple steps. First, researchers segment speech into clauses. Next, they align the gestures with the speech segment using coding software called ELAN, which enables them to transcribe speech for clauses – for example, using 1 to code the presence of an instrument, and 0 to code its absence. Next, they look at and categorize gesture. This is partially done using a code book to standardize coding of otherwise hard-to-quantify movements.
Plans for a second study in English, taking place in person, will manipulate knowledge of listener to see how that affects gesture.
Looking Forward
Myrto Grigoroglou and her team have much to look forward to as they prepare for the 2024-2025 academic year, and all that it will entail in the many fields of research in which they are conducting continuously impressive work.
To read more about her work, see the three pieces discussed in this article linked below, or her profile on the University of Toronto's
Discover Research page.
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