Mary Beth Neff

Academic interests

PhD Fellow on the DEVCOM project led by Ingrid Lossius Falkum. My research interests include pragmatics, theory of mind, and communicative development. My PhD broadly covers non-literal language acquisition in children.

I am also interested in Open Science. In my research I embrace the principles of open science , however am critical that the movement excludes those who do not have the resources to adapt to the ever-evolving initiatives. I am particularly critical of the use of 'scale' as the leading criteria for what counts as important and publishable research ( as scalability can never be separated from resourcing privilege). I believe that to facilitate openness and diversity, we need to confront the scalability issue — not only by finding ways to scale but also by finding ways to support small scale research in a way that legitimizes it rather than relegates it.

Background (see CV )