Month: July 2015

Uncategorized

Jenni Rodd to Chair SLMS Education Domain

Dr Jennifer Rodd has been appointed as the new Chair of the SLMS Education Domain. She takes over the role from Professor Joyce Harper.

Sir Prof John Tooke, Vice Provost (Health), said “I welcome this appointment and have the utmost confidence in Jenni to lead the Education Domain, and make a strong contribution to nurturing educational leadership across the School, and to facilitating a teaching and learning environment and culture that engages our best researchers in the SLMS educational mission. I am sure that the Domain will continue to go from strength to strength under her leadership.”

Congratulations Jenni on your appointment!

Publications

Recent Experience with Words Affects Later Processing in another Language

EPwebsite

In a just-published experiment, we have shown that recent experience with a word in your first language affects how you process that same word some time later in your second language. What’s more, whether this recent experience has a positive or negative effect depends on whether that word has the same or a different meaning in the two languages. Our participants read sentences in their first language, Dutch, that contained words like “film”, which has a similar meaning in both languages, and words like “room”, which confusingly means “cream” in Dutch. When the participants were later asked to decide whether these words were real English words, they were faster with words like “film”, but slower for words like “room”. These results show that the representations of words from different languages are strongly interconnected, and that whenever bilinguals switch between languages, this will influence how easily they can process certain words.

Recent experience with cognates and interlingual homographs in one language affects subsequent processing in another language.

Authors: Eva Poort, Jane Warren and Jennifer Rodd

Keywords: Lexical decision; Cognates; Interlingual homographs; Language switching; Word-meaning priming