My primary research interests are psycholinguistics, semantics, and psychosemantics, with a focus on the online processing of semantic operators that tap into complex logical properties. I’m curious about whether and how comprehenders track these logical properties in real time and how they use logical operators to predict upcoming material. These interests have led me to research phenomena such as negative polarity items, the influence of monotonicity and DE environments, and the online processing of even and its likelihood presupposition. So far, I’ve explored these topics with eye-tracking-while-reading, acceptability judgments, and cloze norm tasks. I’m also excited about the precise temporal information we can get from ERPs, and I’ve worked with Dr. Adrian Staub on his co-registration project involving the simultaneous recording of EEG and eye-tracking.
At the University of Connecticut, I completed an honors thesis about the processing of polarity phenomena and the behavior of the NPI “any” in environments with multiple downward entailing operators. I have also worked as a research assistant in three labs: the Harvard Lab for Developmental Studies under Dr. Susan Carey, the UConn Language Creation Lab under Dr. Marie Coppola, and the UMass Eyetracking Lab under Dr. Adrian Staub.
Publications
Mayer, E., Sprouse, J., & Wurmbrand, S. (2018). An experimental investigation of NPI licensing under DE flip-flop. In NELS 48: Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society.
Presentations
Mayer, E. (2020). Degree modifiers and common ground operators: The case of at all. Poster presentation at SALT 30. Virtual conference held by Cornell University.
Mayer, E., Staub, A., & Dillon, B. (2019). Negation and semantic relatedness in eye-tracking-while-reading. Talk at 20th European Conference on Eye Movements. Alicante, Spain.
Kretzschmar, F., Mayer, E., & Staub, A. (2019). The time-course and source of lexical predictability effects in reading. Presentation at the 20th European Conference on Eye Movements. Alicante, Spain.
Mayer, E., Dillon, B., & Staub, A. (2019). The (non)-influence of even’s likelihood-based presupposition on lexical predictability effects. Talk at Psycholinguistics in Iceland: Parsing and Prediction (PIPP). University of Iceland.
Mayer, E., Dillon, B., & Staub, A. (2019). The (non)-influence of even’s likelihood-based presupposition on lexical predictability effects. Poster at the 32nd Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing (CUNY 32). Boulder, CO.
Mayer, E., Sprouse, J., & Wurmbrand, S. (2017). An experimental investigation of NPI licensing under DE flip-flop. Poster at NELS 48. University of Iceland.