Research

My primary area of research is technical communication, specifically language use (speech, writing, listening, reading) in decision making processes in human-technology interaction. For example, pilot communication during an approach in an airliner, tactics meetings at professional cycling teams before a stage in a stage race, instructions during flight training. I am fascinated by the complex relation between an action-guiding utterance, on the one hand, and the behavior it results in, in practice, on the other. I have a particular interest in the field of ​​safety, reliability and human factors. Within this area of research, I have studied coordination of attention and action, information structure, coherence, questions, interjections, short forms and directives using a range of different methods, including cognitive ethnographical field work, focused ethnography with video recordings, participatory observation, eye tracking, interaction analysis and quantitative and qualitative analysis of text corpora. A particular interesting result is an analysis of natural language information structure based on ecological psychological theories of values, perception, information and affordances.

My secondary area of research is written communication. Within this area, I have studied coherence, information structure, textual inferences, selective attention strategies in reading, text organisation and genre using quantitative and qualitative analysis of text corpora and reading experiments, including qualitative and quantitative analysis of eye tracking data.