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Madeleine Long

MSCA postdoctoral fellow
University of Edinburgh
mlong@ed.ac.uk


About Me

I am the PI of a four-year FRIPRO project at the University of Oslo and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Edinburgh working with Sarah MacPherson.

Previously, I was a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (examining multimodal communication in interactive settings using portable eye-tracking with Paula Rubio-Fernández and Aslı Özyürek) and a postdoc at the University of Oslo (exploring referential communication across the lifespan, across clinical and non-clinical populations, and cross-linguistically with Paula Rubio-Fernández and Hannah Rohde).

Research Programme

My research programme, lifespan pragmatics, addresses questions at the intersection of experimental pragmatics and cognitive ageing. The aim is to uncover the factors (cognitive, linguistic and social) underlying pragmatic competence (e.g., our ability to read between the lines in conversation and adapt speech in partner-specific ways) at different stages of development.

News

Publications

  1. Cognition
    Spatial and social cognition jointly determine multimodal demonstrative reference:Experimental evidence from Turkish and Spanish
    Paula Rubio-Fernández, Madeleine Long, Aslı Özyürek
    Cognition, 2025.
    Link Code

  2. Dev. Psych.
    Prosocial speech acts:Links to pragmatics and aging
    Madeleine Long, Sarah E. MacPherson, Paula Rubio-Fernández
    Developmental Psychology, 2024.
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  3. Open Mind
    Perceptual, semantic, and pragmatic factors affect the derivation of contrastive inferences
    Camilo R. Ronderos, Helena Aparicio, Madeleine Long, Vishakha Shukla, Julian Jara-Ettinger, Paula Rubio-Fernández
    Open Mind, 2024.
    Link Code

  4. Cog. Sci.
    Beyond typicality: Lexical category affects the use and processing of color words
    Madeleine Long, Paula Rubio-Fernández
    Cog. Sci. Proceedings 46, 2024.
    Link Code

  5. Cog. Sci.
    Multimodal communication in newly sighted children: An investigation of the relation between visual experience and pragmatic development
    Paula Rubio-Fernández, Madeleine Long, Vishakha Shukla, Vrinda Bhatia, Anwesha Mahapatra, Chetan Ralekar, Shlomit Ben-Ami, Pawan Sinha
    Cog. Sci. Proceedings 46, 2024.
    Link Code

  6. JEP:LMC
    The role of cognitive control and referential complexity on adults' choice of referring expressions: Testing and expanding the referential complexity scale
    Madeleine Long, Hannah Rohde, Michelle Oraa-Ali, Paula Rubio-Fernández
    JEP:LMC, 2023.
    Link Code

  7. Glossa Psych.
    Children’s acquisition of new/given markers in English, Hindi, Mandinka and Spanish: Exploring the effect of optionality during grammaticalization
    Vishakha Shukla, Madeleine Long, Paula Rubio-Fernández
    Glossa Psycholinguistics, 2022.
    Link Code

  8. Neuropsychologia
    Visual perspective taking is not automatic in a simplified Dot task: evidence from newly sighted children, primary school children and adults
    Paula Rubio-Fernández, Madeleine Long, Vishakha Shukla, Vrinda Bhatia, Pawan Sinha
    Neuropsychologia, 2022.
    Link Code

  9. JEP:LMC
    Some Sentences Prime Pragmatic Reasoning in the Verification and Evaluation of Comparisons
    Vishakha Shukla, Madeleine Long, Vrinda Bhatia, Paula Rubio-Fernández
    JEP:LMC, 2022.
    Link Code

  10. Cognition
    Contrast perception as a visual heuristic in the formulation of referential expressions
    Madeleine Long, Isabelle Moore, Francis Mollica, Paula Rubio-Fernández
    Cognition, 2021.
    Link Code

  11. Child Dev.
    The development of simile comprehension: from similarity to scalar implicature
    Madeleine Long, Vishakha Shukla, Paula Rubio-Fernández
    Child Development, 2021.
    Link Code

  12. Sci. Reports
    The pressure to communicate efficiently continues to shape language use later in life
    Madeleine Long, Hannah Rohde, Paula Rubio-Fernández
    Scientific Reports, 2020.
    Link Code

  13. Biling. Lang. Cogn.
    Understudied factors contributing to variability in cognitive performance related to language learning
    Madeleine Long, Mariana Vega-Mendoza, Hannah Rohde, Antonella Sorace, Thomas Bak
    Bilingualism Language and Cognition, 2020.
    Link Code

  14. PhD Thesis
    The lifelong interplay between language and cognition: from language learning to perspective-taking, new insights into the ageing mind
    Madeleine Long
    PhD Thesis, Edinburgh University, 2018.
    Link

  15. Cognition
    Individual differences in switching and inhibition predict perspective-taking across the lifespan
    Madeleine Long, William S. Horton, Hannah Rohde, Antonella Sorace
    Cognition, 2018.
    Link Code

  16. PLoS ONE
    Novelty, challenge, and practice: the impact of intensive language learning on attentional functions
    Thomas Bak, Madeleine Long, Mariana Vega-Mendoza, Antonella Sorace
    PLoS ONE, 2016.
    Link Code