Month: May 2019

Sentence structure and listening task affect the retuning of lexical-semantic representations, Gilbert, R.A., Davis, M.H., Gaskell, M.G., Rodd., J.M.

https://psyarxiv.com/qvaud/

In this pre-preprint by Becky Gilbert (@beckyannegilbert) and co-authors reports a set of four web-based experiments that use a word-meaning priming method to investigate how/when listeners retune their representations of familiar, ambiguous words.

This results are consistent with a‘good enough’ view of sentence processing in which:

• representations of sentence meanings can remain as (im)precise as mandated by the situation
• learning about the words within sentences varies according to the extent to which participants have produced accurate, precise representations of sentence meaning

Dr Jenni Rodd has been awarded a grant for £573,000 from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to study individual differences in language comprehension across the lifespan. This research will be collaborative with:

• Prof Kate Nation (University of Oxford)
• Dr Rogier Kievit (MRC CBU, Cambridge)
• Dr Matt Davis (MRC CBU, Cambridge)

This funding will support 2 postdoctoral resesarchers and and a graduate research assistant. Information about these vacancies will appear on this website in the coming weeks.

Poort, E.D., Rodd, J.M. (2019). Towards a distributed connectionist account of cognates and interlingual homographs: evidence from semantic relatedness tasks. PeerJ. 7:e6725 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.6725

In this paper Eva reports two pre-registered online experiments looking at how bilingual participants respond to word forms that exist in both their languages: cognates and interlingual homographs. The results show a striking similiarity to the pattern of results seen in monolingual participants for words that are ambiguous within their single language. She proposes a theoretical approach to unifying these two areas of research.

Blott, L.M., Rodd, J.M., Ferreira, F., Warren J. (2019). Semantic ambiguity resolution during sentence comprehension is more efficient in individuals with greater lexical expertise. https://psyarxiv.com/3ejqy/

This pre-print reports an eye-tracking study (N=96) That Lena conducted while visiting Fernanda Ferreira’s lab in UCSD.

The results highlight the importance of reading experience and vocabulary knowledge for the efficiency of on-line reading processes in adult readers.