Researching the Wonders of Words
Dr Jenni Rodd will be giving a talk at an international workshop on ‘Ambiguity as (Information) Gaps: Processes of Creation and Resolution’. The workshop will take place at the University of Tübingen, Germany on 16-17 November 2018.
Details about the workshop can be found here: https://www.uni-tuebingen.de/forschung/forschungsschwerpunkte/graduiertenkollegs/grk-1808-ambiguitaet-produktion-und-rezeption/workshop.html
Dr Jenni Rodd has organised a symposium entitled ‘Accessing the Meanings of Words: Perspectives on Lexical Ambiguity’ for the upcoming joint meeting of the Experimental Psychology Society and the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour, and Cognitive Science. The conference will take place 4-7 July 2018 in St. John’s, Canada.
A preliminary schedule including details on the talks in the symposium can be found here: BBCS_2018_Talk_and_Poster_Schedule.pdf
Congratulations to Dr Hannah Betts who passed her viva with very minor corrections on Monday 14th May 2018. Her thesis is on ‘Retuning lexical-semantic representations on the basis of recent experience’. Thanks to Dr Jane Warren and Dr Matt Davis who were Hannah’s examiners.
Dr Jenni Rodd organised a symposium entitled ‘Learning Words from Experience: The Emergence of Lexical Quality’ at the recently-held International Meeting of the Psychonomic Society in Amsterdam.
Details of the talks that were included in the symposium can be found here: https://www.psychonomic.org/general/custom.asp?page=18AMSsymposia
Greg Maciejewski, Jenni Rodd, and collaborators have a new pre-print available on PsyArXiv, the details of which can be found below:
Title: The cost of learning new meanings for familiar words
Authors: Greg Maciejewski, Jennifer M. Rodd, Mark Mon-Williams, and Ekaterini Klepousniotou
Abstract:
Research has shown that adults are highly skilled at learning new words and meanings. Here, we examined whether learning new meanings for familiar words affects the processing of their existing meanings. In Experiments 1 and 2, adult participants learnt new, fictitious meanings for previously unambiguous words (e.g., “sip” denoting a small amount of computer data) through four 30-minute training sessions completed over four consecutive days. We tested participants’ comprehension of existing meanings before and after training using a semantic relatedness decision task in which the probe word was related to the existing but not the new meaning of the trained word (e.g., “sip-juice”). Following the training, responses were slower to the trained, but not to the untrained, words, indicating competition between newly-acquired and well-established meanings. Furthermore, consistent with studies of semantic ambiguity, the effect was smaller for meanings that were semantically related to existing meanings than for the unrelated counterparts, demonstrating that meaning relatedness modulates the degree of competition. Overall, the key findings confirm that new word meanings can be integrated into the mental lexicon after just a few days’ exposure, and provide support for current models of ambiguity that predict semantic competition in word comprehension.
Rachael Hulme, Dasha Barsky, and Jenni Rodd have a new pre-print available on PsyArXiv, the details of which can be found below:
Authors: Rachael C. Hulme, Daria Barsky, and Jennifer M. Rodd
Abstract:
This study used a web-based naturalistic story-reading paradigm to investigate the impact of number of exposures on incidental acquisition and long-term retention of new meanings for known words in the native language (L1). Participants read one of four custom-written stories in which they encountered novel meanings (e.g., “a safe concealed within a piece of furniture”) for familiar words (e.g., “foam”). These meanings appeared two, four, six, or eight times in the narrative. The results showed reasonably good memory (assessed by cued recall of (i) novel meanings and (ii) word forms) after only two exposures, emphasising the importance of initial encounters. Accuracy in cued recall of novel meanings showed a linear, incremental increase with more exposures. Interestingly, there was no significant forgetting after one week, regardless of the number of exposures during training. This demonstrates the efficiency with which adults acquire new word meanings in L1 incidentally through reading and retain them well over time.
The Word Lab at UCL 