On Saturday, June 13th research institutions in Berlin opened for the public. It was the yearly “Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften Berlin” (“long night of science”). Visitors of all ages could learn about old and new insights of research in all disciplines.
The XPrag.de projects that are located in Berlin prepared little experiments with catchy titles for the visitors. The project “SIGames” asked whether people are “logical or pragmatic”: subjects had to decide whether sentences about girls and marbles containing some were true or false when compared to pictures. People were so excited that they immediately continued with the mouse-tracking experiment created by “SSI” in which traces of their mouse movements allowed them to visually explore whether they were “logical or pragmatic”. People were also queueing up to participate in the third experiment presented by the “YesNo” project to find out whether they are the “yes-” or the “no”-type regarding assertions and questions containing a negation.
In addition there were two talks, one by Uli Sauerland on how children interpret the German “oder” and one by Jack Tomlinson on what the computer mouse tells about cognition. And last but not least, about 100 people watched the video about XPrag.de.
It really was rewarding to talk to so many people being eager to learn about linguistics, pragmatics, and experimental pragmatics in particular. A big thank-you to everyone who contributed!
