Draft:Ira Noveck

Ira Noveck
Citizenship	American, French
Education	B.A in Psychology (Binghamton University, 1984), M.A in Experimental Psychology (New York University, 1987), Ph.D in Experimental Psychology (New York University, 1992), HDR (Université de Lyon II, 2005)
Organization	Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
Known for	Experimental Pragmatics
Notable work	Experimental pragmatics: The making of a cognitive science, Cambridge University Press
Website	https://sites.google.com/site/iranoveck

Ira Noveck (born in New-York City, June 5th, 1962) is a Franco-American (born American) cognitive scientist. He is specialized in experimental pragmatics, a field that he developed in the early 2000s together with the French researcher Dan Sperber. He is currently a Directeur de Recherche (Full Professor) at the Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle (CNRS) in Paris where he leads research projects on various topics revolving around the questions of meaning processing and language acquisition.

Career

After a first degree in psychology, Noveck received his doctoral training in experimental psychology at NYU under the guidance of Martin Braine, a renowned cognitive psychologist. There, he developed an expertise in experimental methods and in pyschology of reasoning that strongly influenced his career. After having completed his PhD, he received a Fyssen post-doctoral grant to study "Children's understanding of necessity and possibility" at Université de Paris VIII in France [1]. He then momentarily returned to North American where he worked two years as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota followed by a year as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Université du Québec in Montreal. In 1995, Noveck returned to France as associate Research Scientist at the CREA-Ecole Polytechnique. He then took on his first and only full-time teaching position at the Université de Grenoble between 1997 and 2000. After this short teaching experience, Noveck obtained a permanent position at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, which allowed him to focus entirely on his research. His first appointment was at the Institut des Sciences Cognitives in Lyon where he stayed almost 20 years. During that time, he became head of the L2C2 lab (2005-2010). He also spent a semester in the department of psychology at Princeton University as a Langfeld Scholar (2005) and three years at the Centre de Recherche Francais in Jerusalem.

While Noveck's background is in experimental psychology, he has developed throughout his career an interest and unique expertise in the linguistic subfield of pragmatics. In 2020, he therefore naturally joined the Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle (CNRS), a Parisian research unit based at the Université Paris Cité and specialized in linguistics. There he created the GRISP (Groupe de Recherche sur l'Inference, la Semantique et la Pragmatique) a research group using experimental methods to study topics such as idioms, metaphors, scalar terms, number cognition or discourse connectives.

The making of a cognitive science

Since the early 2000s, Noveck has had a major impact on the linguistic subfield of pragmatics. By applying experimental methods borrowed from the field of psychology of reasoning to the study of pragmatics, Noveck paved the way to a new research field known as experimental pragamtics. The Brisith linguist Deirdre Wilson, qualified him of pioneer of experimental pragmatics. In 2020, the Symposium: 20 years of Experimental Pragmatics was organized by Valentina Bambini (Full Professor of Linguistics at the University School for Advanced Studies IUSS Pavia) and Filippo Domaneschi (Associate Professor of Linguistics and Theories of Language at the University of Genoa) in celebration of the 20th anniversary of two of Noveck's most influencial publications that are considered as the origin of experimental pragmatics. The article When children are more logical than adults: Experimental investigations of scalar implicature was the first study to highlight that children are not adult-like in their interpretation of scalar terms such as some. While most adults would say that a sentence like Some cats are mammals is false on the basis that by saying some the speaker meant some cats but not all, primary school children accept such sentences as they are logically true. This study has since then inspired a lot of work on this phenomenon called scalar implicature. The article The costs and benefits of metaphor has inspired a whole line of research on the cognitive processes behind metaphors and figurative language in general by highlighting a specfic cognitive cost linked with the interpretation of a term metaphorically instead of literally.

The symposium on the 20th anniversary of these two publications featured talks by eminent scholars from the fields of experimental pragmatics, psychology, cognitive sciences and linguistics about how Noveck's research has influenced their own work and their research field. Among these scholars were Lewis Bott (Cardiff University), Richard Breheny (UCL – Psychology and Language Sciences), Robyn Carston (UCL – Psychology and Language Sciences), Raymond Gibbs (University of California), Nausicaa Pouscoulous (UCL – Psychology and Language Sciences), Walter Schaeken (University of Leuven) and Jesse Snedeker (Harvard University). Following the symposium, a special issue entitled Twenty Years of Experimental Pragmatics. New advances in scalar implicature and metaphor processing, edited by Valentina Bambibini and Filippo Domaneschi was published in the journal Cognition . In their editorial note, Bambini and Domaneshi describe Noveck as the leading figure having "kicked off" experimental pragmatics.

In 2018, Noveck published Experimental pragmatics: The making of a cognitive science a book in which he details the creation and motivations behind the research field of experimental pragmatics as well as the latest findings and developments. In a 2021 review written by a group of researchers from the University of Cambridge led by the linguist Napoleon Katsos, Noveck is described as a "researcher who can be credited perhaps more than anyone with the flourishing of [experimental pragmatics].

Influence

Noveck's influence in experimental pragmatics and in cognitive science in general can not only be expressed by his publications that, as of November 2024 have been cited 7590 times but also by the number of researchers that he has mentored at Doctoral or Post-doctoral level. At a post-doctoral level, Noveck has mentored Lewis Bott (currently Reader in psychology at the University of Cardiff), Edmundo Kronmuller (Associate Professor in psychology at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile), Diana Mazzarella (Professor of cognitive science at the University of Neuchâtel), Morgan Moyer (post-doctoral fellow in linguistics at Sorbonne University) and Anouk Dieuleveut (post-doctoral fellow in linguistics at the University of Geneva).

Noveck has also supervised the doctoral training of students in the fields of psychology, cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, neuroscience and linguistics . Among his students were Nausicaa Pouscoulous (Associate Professor in experimental pragmatics at University College London), Jerome Prado (researcher in developmental cognitive neuroscience at the CNRS), Coralie Chevallier (researcher in cognitive science at Ecole Normale Superieure and INSERM), Nicolo Spotorno (associate researcher in clinical memory at Lund University), Tiffany Morisseau (researcher in cognitive psychology at Universite Paris Cite), Nicolas Petit (researcher and speech and language therapist at Centre Hospitalier Le Vinatier), Cecile Larralde (research associate at Moor House Research and Training Insitute). Noveck is the current doctoral supervisor of Nicholas Griffen (linguistics, Universite Paris Cite) and of Emma Krane Mathisen (linguistics, Universite Paris Cite).