Elsi Kaiser

About

Elsi Heilala Kaiser is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Southern California, where she currently serves as the department chair. Her primary research focus is in psycholinguistics, particularly human sentence processing. She completed her dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania in 2003, which concentrated on reference resolution in Finnish, Dutch, and Estonian, utilizing a combination of psycholinguistic and corpus data. Kaiser holds a B.A. in Germanic Languages and Literatures from Princeton University and an M.A. in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. She was a post-doctoral researcher at the Center for Language Sciences at the University of Rochester from 2003 to 2005 before moving to Los Angeles in 2005. Her research interests encompass issues at the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics interface, including how information structure is encoded and processed, such as word order and prosody coherence relations in discourse, with particular attention to causality, perspective-taking, predicates of personal taste, subjectivity, and phenomena like free indirect discourse. She also investigates reference resolution and dependency formation, focusing on the comprehension and production of personal pronouns, demonstratives, reflexives, and reciprocals, as well as generic and impersonal reference. Her work extends to the representation and processing of linguistic and non-linguistic dependencies, including wh-dependencies and…

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Natural Language Processing
• Philosophy
• Psychology
• Social psychology
• World Wide Web
• Linguistics
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• Discourse anaphoricity vs. perspective sensitivity in emoji semantics

  Glossa a journal of general linguistics · 2023-04-12 · 60 citations

  articleOpen access

  This paper aims to provide a foundation for studying the interplay between emoji and linguistic (natural language) expressions; it does so by proposing a formal semantic classification of emoji- text combinations, focusing on two core sets of emoji: face emoji and activity emoji. Based on different data sources (introspective intuitions, naturalistic Twitter examples, and experimental evidence), we argue that activity emoji (case study I) are essentially event descriptions that serve as separate…

  PublisherDOI

• General Audience Engagement With Antismoking Public Health Messages Across Multiple Social Media Sites: Comparative Analysis

  JMIR Public Health and Surveillance · 2021 · 40 citations

  BACKGROUND: Public health organizations have begun to use social media to increase awareness of health harm and positively improve health behavior. Little is known about effective strategies to disseminate health education messages digitally and ultimately achieve optimal audience engagement. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to assess the difference in audience engagement with identical antismoking health messages on three social media sites (Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram) and with a referring link…

  DOI

• A semantics of face emoji in discourse

  Linguistics and Philosophy · 2023-02-22 · 25 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract This paper presents an analysis of face emoji (disc-shaped pictograms with stylized facial expressions) that accompany written text. We propose that there is a use of face emoji in which they comment on a target proposition expressed by the accompanying text, as opposed to making an independent contribution to discourse. Focusing on positively valenced and negatively valenced emoji (which we gloss as happy and unhappy , respectively), we argue that the emoji comment on how the target pr…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Anaphoricity in emoji: An experimental investigation of face and non-face emoji

  Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America · 2021 · 21 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Emoji are widely used, but have received relatively little attention in psycholinguistic research. Upon encountering a message consisting of both text and emoji, readers presumably construct some link between emoji and text. Based on a psycholinguistic study on text-emoji relations, we argue for (at least) two types of emoji-text dependencies, related to referential dependencies known to exist in the linguistic domain, namely (i) the dependency between an expressive (e.g. wow, damn, f*king) and…

  DOI

• Discourse anaphoricity and first-person indexicality in emoji resolution

  Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung · 2021 · 20 citations

  This paper proposes a formal semantic classification of emoji-text combinations, focusing on two core sets of emoji: face emoji and activity emoji. Based on different data sources (introspective intuitions, naturalistic Twitter examples, and experimental evidence), we argue that activity emoji (case study I) are essentially event descriptions that serve as separate discourse units (similar to free adjuncts) and connect to the accompanying text by virtue of suitable discourse relations. By contra…

  DOI

Recent grants

• Subjectivity in language processing: Linguistic and psychological aspects of perspective-taking

  NSF · $317k · 2018–2023

• Doctoral Dissertation Research: Prosodic Encoding of Informativity

  NSF · $20k · 2015–2017

• NIH Grant R01HD061457

  NIH · $460k · 2013

Frequent coauthors

• Jun Lyu

  15 shared

• Katja Reuter

  SUNY Upstate Medical University

  14 shared

• Jesse Storbeck

  Southern California University for Professional Studies

  14 shared

• NamQuyen Le

  University of Southern California

  12 shared

• Praveen Angyan

  12 shared

• Iris Chuoying Ouyang

  University of Southern California

  11 shared

• Jennifer B. Unger

  University of Southern California

  9 shared

• Francesco Pierini

  9 shared

Similar researchers at University of Southern California

• Louis Goldsteinh-45
• Dani Byrdh-39
• Jason Zevinh-36