In his project called ‘Producing and evaluating style’, Professor Billy Clark will examine how to better understand the mental processes behind everyday conversation.

The research, which has received a Major Research Fellowship from The Leverhulme Trust, will explore two aspects of human communication that have received limited academic attention: the processes involved in producing communicative behaviour and the mechanisms we use to evaluate what others communicate to us.

The study will build on relevance theory, which suggests that humans use ‘fast and frugal heuristics’ – or mental shortcuts – to quickly identify the interpretation that speakers intend. The concept applies not just to verbal communication, but also to nonverbal cues and behaviours.

Professor Clark’s research methodology will include studies on how people consider the possible effects of their communications, with participants discussing potential reactions to their statements and indicating whether they expect positive or negative responses, allowing researchers to map these imagined effects against actual outcomes.

The project will also employ stimulated recall techniques, where researchers ask participants to explain their communication choices immediately after making them. The approach aims to reveal the real-time decision-making processes that determine why we say something one way rather than another.

The fellowship begins this month and will run for two years.

Professor Clark said: “When someone says ‘I'm tired’ with a particular tone of voice and particular kinds of nonverbal behaviour, what are the processes that led them to communicate in that particular way, and how do we as addressees understand what they really mean?”

“My research will investigate whether these processes involve explicit reasoning or are more spontaneous, and how these different kinds of processes interact.”