Laura Pissani

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Departments of Language Science and Technology & Computer Science

Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany

My research integrates theoretically motivated questions from linguistics (semantics and pragmatics) with methods from psychology (experimental paradigms and statistical modeling) and computational modeling (drift diffusion models) to investigate how concepts are represented, stored, and processed in the brain. I am particularly interested in how multiple sources of information combine to compose meaning, especially in cases where meaning is not directly determined by the words themselves, but where listeners must instead make inferences about speakers’ intentions—such as in figurative language comprehension—or derive meaning from multiple channels of information, such as in multimodal environments.

I received my Ph.D. in Psychology from Concordia University in Canada in 2023, advised by Roberto G. de Almeida. In my doctoral dissertation, I examined the time course of literal meaning during metaphor comprehension using the maze task and eye tracking. We observed that the literal meaning of a metaphor can be recovered even after its figurative content has been processed, an effect we call the awakening effect, which suggests that literal meanings are initially accessed and can be reactivated, even for highly familiar metaphors.

Building on this work, my current line of research investigates how meaning is derived in multimodal environments. I am particularly interested in how different modalities, such as verbal content and gestures, are integrated over time and how this integration shapes human cognition and communication.

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

News

11 November 2025 — Our norming paper on 300 metaphors was accepted by Behavior Research Methods (in collaboration with R. G. de Almeida).

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).