Mary Beth Neff

Mary Beth Neff is a Research Fellow at the University of Oslo's Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas (IFIKK). Her doctoral research focuses on non-literal language acquisition in children, supervised by Ingrid Lossius Falkum under the DEVCOM project. She leads an international task force on improving transparency in pilot reporting practices within psychology. Her work spans pragmatics, theory of mind, and developmental psychology, with a commitment to open science methodologies.

Her research interests emphasize understanding how children navigate metaphorical language and communicative development, alongside advancing ethical research practices. Neff collaborates internationally, evidenced by her role in the Predator Free 2050 social-behavioral research and cross-cultural analyses of infant-directed speech.

Publications highlight themes like metaphor comprehension in children, the role of face-to-face interaction in early speech understanding, and acoustic patterns in infant-directed communication across cultures. She actively contributes to open science through the task force’s initiatives, aiming to standardize pilot study reporting in academia.