COMCOG

Welcome to COMCOG – Communication and Cognition at Heidelberg University

At COMCOG, we examine the interaction between language, cognition, and context from a pragmatic perspective. Our research focuses on how communication is shaped by cognitive processes and contextual factors. We study various aspects of communication, from sentence structure to the role of gestures and other modalities in discourse.

How do we communicate meaning through words, gestures, and context?

We explore the mental mechanisms that guide communication—how meaning is constructed and interpreted depending on the context, the participants, and the forms of expression used. Our work on connectives, discourse markers, and multimodal elements highlights the importance of context in shaping effective communication.

A Range of Research Methods

Our research combines theoretical, descriptive, and applied studies, with an emphasis on experimental methods such as eye-tracking. These approaches allow us to observe cognitive processes during communication, providing insights into how language functions in real-time across different languages and settings.

News

Researchers Óscar Loureda, Mathis Teucher, Adriana Cruz, and Pilar Valero will attend XPrag in Cambridge from September 17–19, 2025. They will present the posters “Dealing with Idioms” and “Constructing Discourse”.

Our publication “Dealing with Idioms: An Eye-Tracking Study of Cognitive Processing on L1, L2 and Heritage Speakers of Spanish” has been published in Languages. The study examines how native speakers, second language learners, and heritage speakers process idioms and reveals systematic differences in their cognitive processing.

Our article “Cognitive Processing of Nominal Anaphoric Encapsulation and Coreference in Native Spanish Speakers: An Experimental Approach with Eye-Tracking” has been accepted for publication in Discourse Processes. The study explores how different nominal reference mechanisms are processed and highlights that their informational structure plays a decisive role in cognitive effort.

Our new publication “(Re)Categorizing lexical encapsulation: an experimental approach” in the Journal of Pragmatics provides insights into the cognitive processing of anaphoric reference mechanisms and highlights that adding new information is a key factor in processing effort.

On June 17, Dr. Pilar Valero Fernández (Observatory of Spanish in Europe) and COMCOG researcher Mathis Teucher took part in the International Conference on General Linguistics (CILG) held at the University of Alicante. They gave a joint talk entitled “Lidiando con la no composicionalidad y opacidad fraseológica: estudio de eyetracking sobre su procesamiento cognitivo en el español”.