DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY

Research Interests

As a psycholinguist, my research explores the processes and memory representations underlying routine language use. Much of my work falls within the domain of pragmatics, or the study of the social and contextual factors that affect how people use and understand language. Under this umbrella, I have investigated a range of issues, including the role of common ground and memory processes in discourse production and the ways in which comprehenders incorporate extralinguistic information during language interpretation, especially for non-literal language. I am also very much interested in the nature of people’s epistemic judgments about the knowledge and beliefs of other individuals, and how such judgments affect processes of conversational collaboration.

Selected Publications

Elliott, A., & Horton, W. S. (2024). Typing speed and fluency as cues to uncertainty in the real-time production of written messages. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 77, 1498-1517.

McCarthy, K. S., Magliano, J. P., Levine, S. R., Elfenbein, A., & Horton, W. S. (2021). Constructing mental models in literary reading: The role of interpretive inferences (pp. 85-118). In D. Kuiken & A. Jacobs (Eds.) Handbook of Empirical Literary Studies. Berlin/New York: Mouton De Gruyter.

Hoyos, C., Horton, W. S., Gentner, D, & Simms, N. (2020).  Analogical comparison promotes theory-of-mind development. Cognitive Science, 44, https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12891

Ivanova, I., Horton, W. S., Swets, B., Kleinman, D., & Ferreira, V. S. (2020). Structural alignment in dialogue and monologue (and what attention may have to do with it). Journal of Memory and Language, 110, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2019.104052

Horton, W. S. (2020). Assertion and mindreading. In S. C. Goldberg (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Assertion (pp. 391-414). Oxford University Press.

Schmader, C., & Horton, W. S. (2019). Conceptual effects of audience design in human-computer and human-human dialogues. Discourse Processes, 56, 170-190.

Long, M. R., Horton, W. S., Rohde, H., & Sorace, A. (2018). Individual differences in switching and inhibition predict perspective-taking across the lifespan. Cognition, 170, 25-30.

Horton, W. S., & Gerrig, R. G. (2016).  Revisiting the memory-based processing approach to common ground. Topics in Cognitive Science, 8, 780-795.

Horton, W. S., & Brennan, S. E. (2016).  The role of metarepresentation in the production and comprehension of referring expressions. Frontiers in Psychology, 7:1111. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01111.

Levine, S., & Horton, W. S. (2015).  Helping high school students read like experts: Affective evaluation, salience, and literary interpretation. Cognition and Instruction, 33, 125-153.