The Psychology of Saying What You Don't Mean: Celebrating the Research Career of Professor Albert Katz

Public Significance Statement The human capacity for language enables people to routinely produce and comprehend highly contextualized meaning, even when that meaning differs from or is completely opposite to the component words comprising an utterance or sequence of text (e.g., irony, metaphorical or idiomatic language, humor, and other forms of nonliteral language). In a career spanning more than 45 years, Professor Albert Katz of Western University has illuminated through his research the extraordinary ways that people accomplish this neurocognitive feat, which we all take for granted.