Laura Pissani

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Departments of Language Science and Technology & Computer Science

Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany

I received my Ph.D. in Psychology from Concordia University in Canada in 2023, advised by Roberto G. de Almeida. My research has been largely interdisciplinary, focusing on figurative uses of language and integrating theory-informed hypotheses from linguistics (semantics and pragmatics) with methods and tools from psychology (experimental paradigms and statistical modeling) and natural language processing (computational modeling and large language model evaluation).

As a psycholinguist, I am interested in how concepts are represented and processed in the brain, particularly how semantic and pragmatic information interact to compose meaning. In my doctoral dissertation, I investigated the time course of the literal meaning of metaphors during sentence comprehension. This work led to the discovery of the metaphor awakening effect, which shows that the literal meaning of metaphors can be recovered after the metaphorical expression has been processed. The effect suggests that the literal meaning is initially accessed during comprehension and can be awakened afterwards, even for highly conventional metaphors.

📩 Email: laura.pissani@uni-saarland.de
📍 Office: Saarland University
Language Science and Technology
Campus C7 2, Room 3.04
66123 Saarbrücken, Germany 

News

19 September 2025 — I presented a poster at XPRAG on awakening the literal meaning of metaphors using eye tracking during reading (in collaboration with C. Antal and R. G. de Almeida).

6 September 2025 — I presented a talk at AMLaP on how diffusion models can jointly explain response time and accuracy patterns in maze decisions (in collaboration with J. Duff).

10 August 2025 — I presented a talk at  RAaM 2025  on individual differences in metaphor comprehension (in collaboration with M. Scholman and V. Demberg).

1 August 2025 — I presented a talk at CogSci 2025  on the effects of music-induced mood on metaphor comprehension (in collaboration with my student, M. V. Meiser, and V. Demberg).

27 July 2025 — My students, K. Trinley and N. Dzhubaeva, presented their poster at ACL-SRW on stream-of-consciousness narrative production in humans and LLMs.

20 June 2025 — I presented a talk at MenLex 2025  on the effects of familiarity, aptness, and concreteness on metaphor comprehension (in collaboration with C. Genovesi and R. G. de Almeida).

24-27 September 2024 — I presented a poster at XPRAG.it on preliminary results of the effects of individual differences in metaphor comprehension (in collaboration with M. Scholman and V. Demberg).