Ira Noveck

Biographic Data

ID188709
NAMEIra Noveck
GIVEN NAMESIra
FAMILY NAMENoveck
SIGNATURENOVECK I
AFFILIATIONSCentre National de la Recherche Scientifique
ORCID0000-0002-3401-9629
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS27
TOTAL CITATIONS37
AUTHOR COUNT27
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1987
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX3

  • Learning modal force: Evidence from French

    Open AccessAnouk Dieuleveut, Ira NoveckARTICLELanguage Acquisition2026

    In English or French, modals express either possibility (e.g., “you can come”) or necessity (e.g., “you must come”). Prior acquisition studies have shown that English-speaking children master possibility modals early, but have difficulties with necessity modals, based on converging evidence from both comprehension experiments and corpus studies of children’s spontaneous productions. However, the underlying cause of this Necessity Gap remains deba…

  • Most pragmatic responses to underinformative some-statements are associated with scalar implicatures

    Open AccessPaula Bull-Morales, Ira Noveck et al.ARTICLECognition2026

    A common method for investigating scalar implicatures is to use underinformative sentences, such as Some X are Y, when evidence indicates that All X are Y. Underinformative sentences can have a logical (some and possibly all) or pragmatic (some but not all) interpretation. Recently, Kissine and De Brabanter (2023; Cognition) presented experiments that question whether false responses to underinformative sentences indicate explicit derivation of t…

  • Deciphering the electrophysiological signature of discourse connectives

    Open AccessCarlos Larralde, Ira NoveckARTICLEJournal of Pragmatics2025References: 6

  • Assessing Theory of Mind in Children: A Tablet-Based Adaptation of a Classic Picture Sequencing Task

    Open AccessNicolas Petit, Ira Noveck et al.ARTICLEChild Psychiatry & Human…2024

  • Slowdowns in scalar implicature processing: Isolating the intention-reading costs in the Bott & Noveck task

    Open AccessCamilo R Ronderos, Ira NoveckARTICLECognition2023

  • Revealing pragmatic processes through a one-word answer: When the French reply Si

    Open AccessIra Noveck, Nicolas Petit et al.ARTICLEJournal of Memory and Language2021

  • Effects of Montessori Education on the Academic, Cognitive, and Social Development of Disadvantaged Preschoolers: A Randomized Controlled Study in the French Public-School System

    Open AccessPhilippine Courtier, Marie-Line Gardes et al.ARTICLEChild Development2021

    Previous research on Montessori preschool education is inconsistent and prone to analytic flexibility. In this preregistered study, disadvantaged preschoolers in a French public school were randomly assigned to either conventional or Montessori classrooms, with the latter being adapted to French public education. Adaptations included fewer materials, shorter work periods, and relatively limited Montessori teacher training. Cross-sectional analyse…

  • Colour terms: Native language semantic structure and artificial language structure formation in a large-scale online smartphone application

    Open AccessThomas F Müller, Thomas Müller et al.ARTICLEEuropean Journal of Cognitive…2021

    Artificial language games give researchers the opportunity to investigate the emergence and evolution of semantic structure, i.e. the organisation of meaning spaces into discrete categories. A possible issue with this approach is that categories mightcarry over from participants’ native languages, a potential bias that has mostly been ignored. In a referential communication game, we compare colour terms from three different languages to those of …

  • Pragmatics and mind reading: The puzzle of autism (Response to Kissine)

    Open AccessDiana Mazzarella, Ira NoveckARTICLELanguage2021Cited by: 1References: 5

    Mikhail Kissine's (2021) target article examines autism in order to mine questions about language use and its cognitive underpinnings. Among these, we focus on the question concerning the role of mind reading in language interpretation. Kissine claims that the selective pragmatic profile of highly verbal autistic individuals undermines the existence of an ‘intrinsic link’ between language interpretation and mind reading. We advocate for a more ca…

  • Color terms: Native language semantic structure and artificial language structure formation in a large-scale online smartphone application

    Thomas F Müller, Thomas Müller et al.PREPRINT2020

    Artificial language games give researchers the opportunity to investigate the emergence and evolution of semantic structure, i.e. the organization of meaning spaces into discrete categories. A possible issue for this approach is that categories might simply carry over from participants’ native languages, a potential bias that has mostly been ignored. We investigate this in a referential communication game by comparing color terms from three diffe…

  • Ironic Utterances

    Nicola Spotorno, Ira NoveckCHAPTEROxford Handbook of Experimental…2019

    Irony is a compelling pragmatic phenomenon to investigate experimentally because a) it clearly exposes how an utterance’s meaning can change as a function of context; b) it invites investigations of the cognitive functions that go beyond mere linguistic decoding and, specifically; c) it allows one to have a clearer understanding of the role played by attitude ascription, which we show is central. This chapter will review how attitude ascription b…

  • Reasoning with ‘Some’

    Open AccessBob Van Tiel, Ira Noveck et al.ARTICLEJournal of Semantics2018

    There has been substantial debate about the question of whether ‘some’ is normally interpreted as ‘some but not all’ when it is embedded under a quantifying expression. Experiments using a sentence-picture verification paradigm have been equivocal: while Geurts & Pouscoulous (2009) report that embedded upper-bounded construals of ‘some’ are almost non-existent, Potts et al. (2016) observed substantial rates of upper-bounded construals in at least…

  • Saying, presupposing and implicating: How pragmatics modulates commitment

    Open AccessDiana Mazzarella, Robert Reinecke et al.ARTICLEJournal of Pragmatics2018Cited by: 25References: 27

  • What can historical linguistics and experimental pragmatics offer each other

    Eitan Grossman, Ira NoveckARTICLELinguistics Vanguard2015

    Language change is a central concern for any linguistic theory. For one thing, it is often assumed that language change is explanatory, in that it provides a reasonable answer to what Haspelmath dubbed ‘Greenberg’s Problem’ in 2014: why are languages the way they are? A short version of the Greenbergian answer is: ‘Because they became that way through processes of language change.’ However, this sort of answer throws into focus the fact that lang…

  • Show me the pragmatic contribution: A developmental investigation of contrastive inference

    Open AccessEdmundo Kronmüller, Tiffany Morisseau et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2014

    An utterance such as ‘Show me the large rabbit’ potentially generates a contrastive inference , i.e., the article the and the adjective large allow listeners to pragmatically infer the existence of other entities having the same noun (e.g. a small rabbit). The primary way to measure children's ability to carry out this pragmatic inference has been through tasks that measure infelicity detection. We argue that such studies are not as revealing as …

  • A Developmental Investigation of Processing Costs in Implicature Production

    Nausicaa Pouscoulous, Ira Noveck et al.ARTICLELanguage Acquisition2007

    Much developmental work has been devoted to scalar implicatures. These are implicitly communicated propositions linked to relatively weak terms (consider how Some pragmatically implies Not all) that are more likely to be carried out by adults than by children. Children tend to retain the linguistically encoded meaning of these terms (wherein Some is compatible with All). In three experiments, we gauge children's performance with scalars while inv…

  • What Autism Can Reveal About Every … not Sentences

    Ira Noveck, I A Noveck et al.ARTICLEJournal of Semantics2006

    The sentence Every horse did not jump over the fence can be interpreted with the negation taking scope over the quantifier (i.e. not every horse jumped) or with the quantifier Every taking scope over the negation (ultimately providing the reading no horse jumped). Beginning with Musolino, Crain and Thornton (2000), much work has shown that while adults typically adopt a Not every reading in ‘2-of-3’ contexts (e.g. where 2-of-3 horses jump over a …

  • Some utterances are underinformative: The onset and time course of scalar inferences

    Open AccessLewis Bott, Ira Noveck et al.ARTICLEJournal of Memory and Language2004

  • Characterizing the time course of an implicature: An evoked potentials study

    Open AccessIra Noveck, Ira A Noveck et al.ARTICLEBrain and Language2003

  • When children are more logical than adults: Experimental investigations of scalar implicature

    Open AccessIra Noveck, Ira A NoveckARTICLECognition2001

  • The Costs and Benefits of Metaphor

    Ira Noveck, Maryse Bianco et al.ARTICLEMetaphor and Symbol2001

  • The Costs and Benefits of Metaphor

    Ira Noveck, Ira A Noveck et al.ARTICLEMetaphor and Symbol2001

    Many researchers consider metaphor so fundamental to psychological activity that they claim that it does not require extra cognitive effort to process. While not disputing that metaphors are natural to human cognition, we argue that a metaphor's relative ease-of-use ought not be confounded with an expectation that it prompts no extra effort. As many studies show (including those presented here), metaphors often come with costs when compared to no…

  • Children's understanding of epistemic modals

    Open AccessIra Noveck, Ira A Noveck et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language1996

    Prior empirical work in semantic development has produced an impressive finding showing that children can reliably detect a modal's relative force (e.g. that must is stronger sounding than may ) by five-and-a-half years of age. We investigate the extent to which a representation of relative force can account for an understanding of epistemic modals when their logical meaning is considered (i.e. when modals are interpretable as expressions of nece…

  • Human Reasoning is Both Logical and Pragmatic

    Ira Noveck, Ira A Noveck et al.ARTICLEIntellectica Revue de l…1991

    Although several prominent critics have argued against any significant role for a logical or mathematical competence in human reasoning, we argue that such a competence is basic. Our approach to logical reasoning consists of (a) a basic set of inference schémas for logical particles such as if, and, not, and or that accounts for competence, (b) a reasoning program that implements them, and (c) a set of independently motivated pragmatic principles…

  • Are conjunction rule violations the result of conversational rule violations

    Open AccessGuy Politzer, Ira Noveck et al.ARTICLEJournal of Psycholinguistic…1991Cited by: 5References: 14