Project overview
This idea for this project arose from an interest in the use of ‘probability expressions’ in the media and across maths and science. Risk and uncertainty are often communicated with verbal probability expressions (VPEs): expressions such as “unlikely,” “possible,” and “likely.” Such expressions are, it is believed, so vaguely understood that there is an “illusion of communication”: speaker and hearer believe that they understand each other but, in fact, do not. This study builds on other work in the field and seeks to collect more data to increase understanding of how different groups of people understand these sorts of words. Our current data collection focuses on secondary school-age students and university students for whom English is not their first language.
