On August 14th, Erika Mayer successfully defended her dissertation entitled “The online processing of even’s likelihood presupposition.” In her thesis, Erika used a range of psycholinguistic methods to investigate the real-time processing of the likelihood presupposition associated with even. Erika’s results showed that, unlike some other semantic or discourse operators, comprehenders generally do not use the presence of even to modulate lexical expectations about how the sentence is likely to unfold. Her results offer interesting insights into what type of an operator even may be, as well as the types of information that comprehenders can incrementally use in sentence comprehension. Erika’s committee consisted of Brian Dillon (chair), Vincent Homer, and Adrian Staub.

(Photo cred: Vincent Homer)

Congratulations, Erika!