One of my main research interests is connecting creativity with language. Our notions of creativity are challenged by how language works, especially in regards to figurative language. This has led me down a path to on focus satire, a unique combination of irony and humour, as well as other forms of figurative language. I am most interested in satirical discourse, which is criminally understudied in language fields.
I am also interested in perceptions of creativity as they relate to the production of figurative language and have begun working more on that. My PhD dissertation included three studies investigating these aspects, which can now be found in the published articles below.
I’ve also done quite a few studies using quantifiable linguistic features to perform text categorization for creativity, figurative language, and humour.
Please email me for a copy of any article you cannot access.
My favourite thing to study is satirical discourse. I was exposed to The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and The Onion years before I became an academic. My entire idea for doing a PhD was based on reading satirical Amazon.com product reviews, which is the 2015 paper below that was published in an open access journal. For some reason, academics don’t really study satire very much, at least not from the methods and approaches I am trained in. If you are a prospective PhD student interested in satire, please email me :)
Skalicky, S. (2019). Investigating satirical discourse processing and comprehension: the role of cognitive, demographic, and pragmatic features. Language and Cognition 11(3), 499-525. doi:10.1017/langcog.2019.30 Journal Site
Skalicky, S., & Crossley, S. A. (2019). Examining the online processing of satirical newspaper headlines. Discourse Processes, 56(1), 61–76. doi:10.1080/0163853X.2017.1368332 Journal Site
Skalicky, S. (2018). Lexical priming in humorous satirical newspaper headlines. HUMOR – The International Journal of Humor Studies, 31(4), 583–602. Journal Site
Skalicky, S, & Crossley, S. (2015). A statistical analysis of satirical Amazon.com product reviews. The European Journal of Humour Research, 2(3), 66-85. Open Access
It makes sense that much of the psycholingusitic research of figurative language is focused on comprehension and representation. But production is also equally as interesting. I’ve got one paper now trying to add to the growing literature on figurative language production.
This paper was a blast. We manually downloaded all the hits of JK in COCA - knowing what I know now I would have automated that a bit :)