Jia Ern Loy

I am a postdoctoral researcher with a background in psychology, linguistics, and cognitive science. I am broadly interested in the pragmatics of how we interact and communicate. My work has covered a variety of pragmatic phenomena including implicature, overspecification, and audience design.

I am currently part of Vera Demberg's lab at Saarland University, where I work on individual differences in discourse and pragmatics. My recent work looks at individual differences in perspective-taking and human-computer interaction.

I was previously a postdoc at the Centre for Language Evolution at the University of Edinburgh, where I was part of Kenny Smith's project on the evolution of linguistic complexity. My work examined how inferences about our interlocutors' linguistic or communicative context influence language use during interaction.

My PhD work with Martin Corley and Hannah Rohde made use of eye- and mouse-tracking paradigms to investigate the the role of disfluencies in listeners' on-line pragmatic inferences, focussing on the comprehension of deception and scalar implicatures.


Here are some projects I'm working on: osf.io/hd6js

You can contact me at: jialoy@coli.uni-saarland.de



publications

Loy, J. E. & Demberg, V. (2023) Perspective taking reflects beliefs about partner sophistication: Modern computer partners vs. basic computer and human partners. Cognitive Science.doi.

Loy, J. E. & Demberg, V. (2023) Individual Differences in Spatial Orientation Modulate Perspective Taking in Listeners. Journal of Cognition. doi

Demberg, V., Kravtchenko, E. & Loy, J. E. (2023) A systematic evaluation of factors affecting referring expression choice in passage completion tasks. Journal of Memory and Language. doi

Loy, J. E. & Smith, K. (2021) Speakers align with their partner's overspecification during interaction. Cognitive Science. doi.

Loy, J. E. Bloomfield, S & Smith, K. (2020) Effects of priming and audience design on the explicitness of referring expressions. Discourse Processes.

King, J. P. J., Loy, J. E., Rohde, H. & Corley, M. (2020) Interpreting nonverbal cues to deception in real time. PLoS ONE. doi

Loy, J. E., Rohde, H. & Corley, M. (2019) Real-time social reasoning: the effect of disfluency on the meaning of some. Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science. doi

Rabagliati, H., Corley, M., Derring, B., Hancock, P. J. B., King, J., Levitan, C. A., Loy, J. & Millen, A. E. (2019) Many Labs 5: Registered Replication Report of Crosby, Monin & Richardson (2008). Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science. link

Loy, J. E., Rohde, H. & Corley, M. (2018) Cues to Lying May Be Deceptive: Speaker and Listener Behaviour in an Interactive Game of Deception. Journal of Cognition. doi

King, J. P. J., Loy, J. E. & Corley, M. (2018) Contextual effects on online pragmatic inferences of deception. Discourse Processes. doi

Loy, J. E., Rohde, H & Corley, M. (2017) Effects of disfluency in online interpretation of deception. Cognitive Science. doi


conference proceedings/presentations

Loy, J. E. & Demberg, V. (2022) Partner effects and individual differences on perspective taking. In Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. pdf

Loy, J. E. & Smith, K. (2020) Influence of partner behaviour on overspecification. In Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. pdf

Smith, K., Frank, S., Rolando, S., Kirby, S. & Loy, J. E. (2020) Simple kinship systems are more learnable. In Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. pdf

Saldana, C., Loy, J. E. & Smith, K. (2019) Illusory correlations and the acquisition of probabilistic linguistic variation. Poster at Interdisciplinary Advances in Statistical Learning.

Loy, J. E., Rohde, H., & Corley, M. (2016) Lying about where the treasure lies: Pragmatic cues to deception in production and comprehension. Poster at the 22nd AMLaP conference.

Loy, J., Rohde, H & Corley, M. (2016) Lying, in a manner of speaking. In Proceedings of Speech Prosody 8. pdf

Loy, J. E., Rohde, H. & Corley, M. (2015) The truth about lying: Pragmatic judgements about speaker reliability are made on-line. Talk at the 21st AMLaP conference.


PhD thesis

Loy, J. E. (2018) Effects of manner of delivery in on-line pragmatic inferences. pdf (UoE archives)



Courses taught:

Paralinguistic and extralinguistic signals in communication (Summer semester 2023)

Interaction and language adaptation (Summer semester 2022)

Experimental pragmatics (Winter semester 2021/22)

Individual differences and language processing (Summer semester 2021)

Introduction to Cognitive Science Python guest lectures (2018--2020)


Tutoring:

Introduction to Cognitive Science Python programming labs (2015--2017)

Research Methods and Statistics 2 and 3 Statistics and R labs (2016--2017)


Research supervised:

I am interested in supervising research on a range of topics relating to dialogue/interaction, individual differences, pragmatics, disfluencies, and deception. Some projects I have co-supervised in the past include:

Projects I am currently supervising:



Some fun projects in my spare time


recordthis: HTML/js scripts for a web-based recording tool (useful for remote recording of experiment stims/audio)


codethis: python-based GUI for annotating sound files to csv output (currently only in Linux)



Demo versions of some of my online experiments


Monster building


Referring expression naturalistic passage completion (Demberg, Kravtchenko & Loy, 2023; Experiment 3)


Spatial perspective taking: modern robot partner condition, basic robot partner condition (Loy & Demberg, 2022)


Individual differences: OSpan task


Individual differences: Faux Pas task


Individual differences: Keep track task


Individual differences: Object perspective test