Benjamin Weissman

Lecturer, Cognitive Science

Dr. Weissman's research focuses on meaning in conversation from a cognitive and linguistic perspective. With a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Dr. Weissman has conducted research at the intersections of pragmatics, psycholinguistics, and experimental linguistics. His dissertation investigated the effects of context and different types of linguistic meaning on lie judgments; current research expands on this topic. In addition, Dr. Weissman has become one of the leading researchers in the growing topic of emoji studies, with research on how emojis get processed in the brain and combine with words to convey meaning in text-based conversations. At RPI, Dr. Weissman works with students in introductory Cognitive Science and Linguistics classes as well as advanced Psycholinguistics.

 

Education

PhD, Linguistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

MA, Linguistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

BA, Linguistics, College of William and Mary

Contact Information
Select Works
  • Weissman, Benjamin, and Darren Tanner. "A strong wink between verbal and emoji-based irony: How the brain processes ironic emojis during language comprehension." PloS one 13, no. 8 (2018): e0201727. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0201727
  • Weissman, Benjamin, and Marina Terkourafi. "Are false implicatures lies? An empirical investigation." Mind & Language 34, no. 2 (2019): 221-246. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/mila.12212
  • Terkourafi, Marina, Benjamin Weissman, and Joseph Roy. "Different scalar terms are affected by face differently." International Review of Pragmatics 12, no. 1 (2020): 1-43. https://brill.com/view/journals/irp/12/1/article-p1_1.xml
  • Tanner, Darren, Maria Goldshtein, and Benjamin Weissman. "Individual differences in the real-time neural dynamics of language comprehension." In Psychology of learning and motivation, vol. 68, pp. 299-335. Academic Press, 2018. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0079742118300070