Reasoning, Linguistics, and Neurotype

Jago is an ESRC-funded reasoning researcher, focusing on the impact of language and neurotype on reasoning ability.  Her current project, Reasoning, Language, and Neurotype at Bangor University is supervised by Dr Alan Wallington and Dr Eirini Sanoudaki.

Jago has an MA in Bilingualism and a BA in Linguistics, and currently has three peer-reviewed publications on the topics of platial language and climate change, with another in preparation.  She was one of Linguist List’s Rising Stars of 2023.

Phillip Wadley is a linguist and cognitive scientist from the USA. He received his BA at University of Tennessee in 2018 and his MA in 2019 at Bangor University. Recently completing his PhD in linguistics, he specialises in the semantics and pragmatics of figurative language. His research background includes interdisciplinary work in music cognition, mental representation of concreteness, and computational analysis of language. Phillip's current interest is in 'literal thinking' in metaphor interpretation among autistic adults. As part of the ReLiaNt Group, the project he leads “Metaphor in Autism” is aimed at learning how autists and neurotypicals understand metaphor differently, with the application goals of bridging gaps in communication across neurotypes.

James is a psycholinguist specialising in bilingual lexical access and morphophonological processing, with a particular focus on Welsh initial consonant mutation (ICM). His research examines how bilingual speakers of Welsh and English recognise spoken words when surface forms vary systematically, exploring how this affects competition, prediction, and access in the bilingual mental lexicon.

He has a MArts in English Language for TEFL, an MA in Bilingualism, and has recently completed his PhD in Bilingualism (Linguistics) at Bangor University, where his thesis investigated the role of mutation in Welsh lexical access. His broader research interests include bilingual language processing, psycholinguistic modelling, and the cognitive mechanisms underlying morphophonological alternation.

Charlie is a linguist specialising in disability linguistics, with particular focus on the pragmatics of within-community autistic communication. He has a BA in Linguistics and the English Language from Bangor University, and is currently working on his MA thesis, which will evaluate the relationship between indirectness and perceived politeness across neurotypes, focusing on a within-community approach.

He applies neurodiversity model-informed approaches in non-academic areas in projects such as Fully Accessible Bangor (a university disability campaigning group), chairing Bangor University’s autistic students’ society, and giving regular training to various bodies on accessibility planning and best communication methods. He was the recipient of the Athena Swan Inclusive Scholarship in 2024 due to his ambition towards representing autistic researchers in autism research. 

Kavya is a PhD researcher in Cognitive Psychological Sciences at the University of Essex, supervised by Prof Miroslav Sirota and Prof Marie Juanchich. She holds double masters, an MSc (Master of Science) in Psychology from the University of Essex and an MCom (Master of Commerce) from the University of Delhi. Her PhD is embedded within a research project led by Prof Miroslav Sirota and funded by the Leverhulme Trust. 

Her research investigates the cognitive processes underpinning reasoning and decision-making, with a particular focus on the role and purpose of cognitive reflection. She examines how intuitive and analytical thinking contribute to people’s ability to detect errors, avoid cognitive biases, evaluate information, and make everyday judgments.

She is currently contributing to a large-scale, cross-cultural global project in collaboration with the Psychological Science Accelerator (PSA) that examines how individuals recognise and correct their own reasoning errors. She is a proud member of the ReLiaNt group, representing the Re – Reasoning strand.

Alan is a lecturer in Linguistics at Bangor University with a Ph.D from the then Centre for Computational Linguistics at UMIST/Manchester University. My overarching interest is in developing theoretical, and hopefully testable, models of human language parsing or processing. This means that I am primarily interested in those patterns and generalisations found in language that are relevant to, and impact on, the processing and interpretation of language as opposed to those that reflect how humans learn a language or how a language develops over time. My Ph.D and some subsequent work mainly concerned structural or syntactic aspects of language processing, such as structural ambiguity resolution or the cause of garden-path sentences. 

However, I later became interested in aspects of meaning, especially, but not solely, in how figurative language and metaphor are interpreted. I reject the view that metaphor interpretation is somewhat like decoding, where we have a mapping or look-up table that gives for any expression in the source domain of the metaphor its equivalent in the target domain of literal language. Attempts to do this always seem somewhat contrived. Instead, I would suggest, a metaphor triggers a chain of inferences concerning what would be concluded if the actual scenario invoked by the metaphor were to hold, a process somewhat akin to counterfactual reasoning.