About

Alexis Wellwood is a Professor in the School of Philosophy at the University of Southern California, with courtesy appointments in the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Psychology. Her research focuses on how words combine into sentences and the significance of those combinations for human representation and reasoning about the world. Since arriving at USC in 2017, she has created and directed the Meaning Lab, which studies what adults and children know about word and sentence meaning, and has sat on the steering committee for the Cognitive Science Program. Wellwood has also been involved in collaborative research projects with linguists, philosophers, psychologists, and computer scientists, often mentoring undergraduate students, graduate students, and post-doctoral scholars. She has contributed to building research infrastructure and public outreach initiatives, including co-directing the Mind and Language in LA speaker series. Her work has been supported by grants such as a National Science Foundation Brain and Cognitive Sciences award. Wellwood earned her PhD in 2014 from the Department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland, where her research in semantics, language acquisition, and psycholinguistics was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada and the Maryland Language Science Center. She has served as Deputy Director of Philosophy at USC from 2022-2025, as a Leadership Fellow to the USC Dornsife Divisional Dean of Humanities, and as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Semantics since 2021. Additionally, she directed the first fully-hybrid North American Summer School for Logic, Language, and Information at USC in 2022.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Linguistics
• Cognitive psychology
• Epistemology
• Philosophy
• Natural Language Processing
• Cognitive science
• Sociology
• Mathematics
• Neuroscience
• History

Selected publications

• Observers Efficiently Extract the Minimal and Maximal Element in Perceptual Magnitude Sets: Evidence for a Bipartite Format

  Psychological Science · 2024-01-18 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  The mind represents abstract magnitude information, including time, space, and number, but in what format is this information stored? We show support for the bipartite format of perceptual magnitudes, in which the measured value on a dimension is scaled to the dynamic range of the input, leading to a privileged status for values at the lowest and highest end of the range. In six experiments with college undergraduates, we show that observers are faster and more accurate to find the endpoints (i.e., the minimum and maximum) than any of the inner values, even as the number of items increases beyond visual short-term memory limits. Our results show that length, size, and number are represented in a dynamic format that allows for comparison-free sorting, with endpoints represented with an immediately accessible status, consistent with the bipartite model of perceptual magnitudes. We discuss the implications for theories of visual search and ensemble perception.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Processing wh-filler-gap dependencies

  Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology · 2024-02-06 · 1 citations

  article

  We present experimental evidence showing that different wh-filler-gap dependencies are processed differently, depending on their syntactic licensors. Our studies compared the active storage profiles for why, how, and who (serving as subject or object of the verb). The results of offline and online experiments revealed that these wh-fillers are stored in memory for different durations, and predictably so based on the hypothesised structural distance between each wh-filler and the licensor which determines its grammatical and interpretive functions. Furthermore, the results showed that once the wh-filler is licenced, it is integrated to the current structure, and no longer engenders additional memory costs. Based on these findings, we argue that the mechanism of online sentence processing may employ both storage and integration components in memory.

  PublisherDOI

• Confidence reports

  Semantics and Pragmatics · 2024-11-12

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  We develop a states-based semantics for nominal and adjectival confidence reports like Ann is confident/has confidence that it’s raining, and their comparative forms. Our account leverages a Neodavidsonian analysis of adjectival comparatives in which adjectives denote properties of states and measure functions are introduced compositionally. We hereby provide the first systematic semantics for confidence reports, in addition to providing a needed modal extension to the states-based semantics of comparatives. As we show, the flexibility accorded by the Neodavidsonian implementation supports analysis of grammatical constructions with confident/confidence that might otherwise be puzzling, and it lends itself to certain natural ideas about the semantics of cross-categorial probabilistic language using, e.g., likely and probability. In the end, we sketch some immediate connections between confidence-reporting discourse (e.g., I am confident that…) and belief reports about probabilistic discourse (e.g., I think it’s likely that…). EARLY ACCESS

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Nonboolean Conditionals

  Experiments in Linguistic Meaning · 2023-01-27 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  On standard analyses, indicative conditionals behave in a Boolean fashion when interacting with and and or. We test this prediction by investigating probability judgments about sentences of the form "If A, then B {and, or} if C, then D". Our findings are incompatible with a Boolean picture. This is challenging for standard analyses of ICs, as well as for several nonclassical analyses. Some trivalent theories, conversely, may account for the data.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Linguistic meanings in mind

  Behavioral and Brain Sciences · 2023-01-01 · 2 citations

  letter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The target article focuses on evidence from nonlinguistic faculties to defend the claim that cognition generally traffics in language-of-thought (LoT)-type representations. This focus creates needed space to discuss the mounting accumulation of nonclassical evidence for LoT, but it also misses relevant work in linguistics that directly offers a perspective on specific hypotheses about candidate LoT representations.

  PublisherDOI

• Problems and Mysteries of the Many Languages of Thought

  Cognitive Science · 2022 · 22 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Sociology
  • Cognitive science

  "What is the structure of thought?" is as central a question as any in cognitive science. A classic answer to this question has appealed to a Language of Thought (LoT). We point to emerging research from disparate branches of the field that supports the LoT hypothesis, but also uncovers diversity in LoTs across cognitive systems, stages of development, and species. Our letter formulates open research questions for cognitive science concerning the varieties of rules and representations that underwrite various LoT-based systems and how these variations can help researchers taxonomize cognitive systems.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Framing events in the logic of verbal modification

  Proceedings from Semantics and Linguistic Theory · 2022-12-29

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  I ask what a small set of modification data requires of clausal event semantics. Classic Davidsonian semantics posits that modifiers like "in the hallway" express properties of events, and expects that iterations of such modifiers will simply contribute additional conjuncts at logical form. The data I consider challenges this view, and others cast in the Davidsonian spirit, at least so long as we hope to preserve an important and plausible semantic principle, Role Exhaustion (Williams 2015). As I show, preserving the principle and accounting for the facts can be accomplished by adopting two independently-motivated sets of claims: first, that verbs introduce existential closure over their event argument, and modifiers take verb meanings as semantic arguments (Champollion 2015); second, that simple clauses have two layers of event description, "framing" and "framed" (Schein 2016). In the end, I sketch two possible extensions of the approach, towards the interpretation of temporal modification and negative perceptual reports.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Linguistic meanings as cognitive instructions

  Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2021 · 20 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Linguistics
  • Psychology

  Natural languages like English connect pronunciations with meanings. Linguistic pronunciations can be described in ways that relate them to our motor system (e.g., to the movement of our lips and tongue). But how do linguistic meanings relate to our nonlinguistic cognitive systems? As a case study, we defend an explicit proposal about the meaning of most by comparing it to the closely related more: whereas more expresses a comparison between two independent subsets, most expresses a subset-superset comparison. Six experiments with adults and children demonstrate that these subtle differences between their meanings influence how participants organize and interrogate their visual world. In otherwise identical situations, changing the word from most to more affects preferences for picture-sentence matching (experiments 1-2), scene creation (experiments 3-4), memory for visual features (experiment 5), and accuracy on speeded truth judgments (experiment 6). These effects support the idea that the meanings of more and most are mental representations that provide detailed instructions to conceptual systems.

  PublisherDOI

• <em>Being tall compared to</em> compared to being tall and being taller

  Experiments in Linguistic Meaning · 2021-07-30

  articleOpen access

  This paper investigates the semantics of implicit comparatives (Alice is tall compared to Bob) and its connections to the semantics of explicit comparatives (Alice is taller than Bob) and sentences with adjectives in plain positive form (Alice is tall). We consider evidence from two experiments that tested judgments about these three kinds of sentence, and provide a semantics for implicit comparatives from the perspective of degree semantics.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Interpreting Degree Semantics

  Frontiers in Psychology · 2020 · 6 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Epistemology

  does not, contra intuition-after all, one would think that what is minimally cheap is (just) free. Such claims, found in sufficient abundance, raise the question of how we can support semantic theories that posit properties of entities that those entities appear to lack. This paper argues, using theories of adjectival scale structure as a test case, that the (un)acceptability data recruited in semantic explanations reveals properties of a two-stage system of semantic interpretation that can support divergences between our semantic and metaphysical intuitions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Individuating and comparing objects and events

  NSF · $462k · 2018–2022

Frequent coauthors

• Jeffrey Lidz

  University of Maryland, College Park

  9 shared

• Susan J. Hespos

  Northwestern University

  6 shared

• Haley Farkas

  6 shared

• Tim B. Hunter

  5 shared

• Darko Odic

  University of British Columbia

  5 shared

• Valentine Hacquard

  University of Maryland, College Park

  4 shared

• Michaël Gagnon

  University of Maryland, College Park

  4 shared

• Justin Halberda

  Johns Hopkins University

  4 shared

Labs

• Meaning LabPI

Education

• PhD, Department of Linguistics

  University of Maryland

  2014

Awards & honors

• Albert S. Raubenheimer award for Outstanding Junior Faculty…