Louise CUMMINGS (Fellow)
Fields of Study:
Pragmatics, clinical linguistics, and public health reasoning with focus on pragmatic language disorders and the application of logical fallacies to public health reasoning
Profile:
Louise Cummings is Professor at the Department of English, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Louise Cummings' research in her own words:
"I conduct research in three main areas: Linguistics (pragmatics and clinical linguistics); Communication disorders (particularly pragmatic disorders); and Public health communication. The current focus of my research in pragmatic disorders is on the role that pragmatic features of language can play in the diagnosis of conditions such as dementia. More generally, I am interested in the interface between cognitive deficits and pragmatic language impairments. I have a special interest in pragmatic disorders in complex populations and populations that are currently underserved by clinical language services. My research in public health examines the reasoning strategies that experts and lay people use to assess health risks and inform decision-making. The emphasis of this work is on a group of arguments that are typically characterized as fallacies, but which can be shown to function as facilitative cognitive heuristics during reasoning. To date, I have examined the use of these arguments in an experimental investigation of public health reasoning in 879 members of the public, and by expert scientific committees charged with assessing the human health risks of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) in British cattle."
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