This project started as kind of a joke when I was struggling to come up with a project for a semantics class. The debate about whether a hotdog is a sandwich has reached meme status, but it was also a conversation that was held at a lab dinner. And because linguistics is concerned with what people actually do when they use language, it seems relevant to investigate how people categorize this type of thing when they actually have this argument.

This made me think about how various foods fit within the sandwich space overall, but also how those foods relate to each other.

I love this project because, frankly, it sounds stupid. Maybe because of its presumably low-prestige status as water cooler talk, very little quantitative work has been done in this specific space. But at its core, it address a larger question of how people do categorization when the category itself is ambiguous. It’s a fun debate because it’s an ambiguous space, and therefore it’s impossible to settle on a single correct answer.

Being able to approach the larger question of categorization in fuzzy spaces is important not only because of its ties to language and cognition, but its legal relevance (see White City Shopping Center v. PR Restaurant Group, or Martin Quintana v. the Fort Wayne Planning Commission).

Currently, my collaborators (Dr. Cass Jacobs and Dr. Andrés Buxó-Lugo) and I are working on a feature normalization task, and then using those norms to inform a false memory task. Semantic relationships can inform memory, but what if the relationships are fuzzy? What can false memories tell us about semantic spaces? Additionally, exploring how the sandwich space differs between various cultures would provide insight into how cognitive processes are shaped by social contexts.

This section is in progress, but feel free to contact me if you have any questions!