Associate Professor, Department of Psychology
Cognitive Area Head
Principal Investigator, Cognition and Communication Lab
Office Location: Swift Hall 217
Office Phone: 847-467-1293
Email: whorton[at]northwestern.edu
My Research: I am a psycholinguist interested in the socio-cognitive mechanisms that support high-level aspects of language production and comprehension. In particular, I am interested in discourse pragmatics—i.e., how people use language to convey meaning within diverse communicative contexts. Broadly, my work investigates the ways in which specific aspects of the communicative situation combine with speakers’ cognitive capacities to shape the utterances that people produce and the kinds of meanings they take away from their interactions with others.
I have examined these issues within several interrelated domains, including:
- perspective-taking and the role of common ground during referential communication
- the role of memory-based mechanisms during language use
- how normal aging affects communicative processes
I am also very much interested in how comprehenders process figurative language and non-literal aspects of meaning, and also in the nature of epistemic judgments in spoken and written contexts.
More about me…
Fall 2024: I will be considering graduate applications for the Fall 2025 admissions cycle. If you are interested in learning more about my lab or about our Ph.D. program, please email me.