Researching the Wonders of Words
Jenni has been a frequent visitor and collaborator at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge (@mrccbu) since she completed her PhD there many years ago!
She currently has an ESRC grant working with CBU programe leaders Matt Davis (@DrMattDavis) and Rogier Kievit (@rogierK)
In recognition of this long-standing and productive relationship she has been appointed a Senior Affiliated Scientist.
Eva Poort (@EvaDPoort) and Jenni Rodd (@jennirodd) have published a database of of Dutch-English cognates and interlingual homographs in the Journal of Cognition
see here for the paper
Greg Maciejewski (now at the University of the West of Scotland) has published a paper entitled
Abstract
Research has shown that adults are skilled at learning new words and meanings. We examined whether learning new meanings for familiar words affects the processing of their existing meanings. Adults learnt fictitious meanings for previously unambiguous words over four consecutive days. We tested comprehension of existing meanings using a semantic relatedness decision task in which the probe word was related to the existing but not the new meaning. Following the training, responses were slower to the trained, but not to the untrained, words, indicating competition between newly-acquired and well-established meanings. This 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 findings confirm that new meanings can be integrated into the mental lexicon after just a few days’ exposure, and provide support for current models of ambiguity processing.
The Word Lab at UCL 