Researching the Wonders of Words
Research Fellow position funded by our @ESRC grant “Individual Differences in Comprehension across the Lifespan” working with @JenniRodd @LenaMBlott @ReadOxford @DrMattDavis
Position funded for 2 years with a start date or 1st July 2021, but there is some flexibility in this. Ideally we would like somebody in post by 1 October 2021.
The deadline for applications is April 25th. Interviews will likely take place in the week commencing 4th May (via zoom).
See here for more info
Her talk was based on her recent Perspectives on Psychological Science review paper: Settling into Semantic Space
The slides are available here
Thanks to Nikki Dean Marshall for the invitation. It was fun!
Learning new word meanings from story reading: The benefit of immediate testing
This new preprint from @Rach_Hulme and @JenniRodd looked at incidental learning of vocabulary from story contexts. It demonstrated a robust learning boost when this new vocab knowledge was tested immediately after the stories were read.
This work, led by Becky Gilbert explores the learning mechanisms by which lexical-semantic knowledge about the relatively likelihoods of the alternative meanings of ambiguous words is updated. Our findings suggest that this form of lexical-semantic retuning is driven by participants’ final interpretation of the word meanings during the prime encounter, regardless of initial meaning activation or misinterpretation.
See here for a fab twitter thread that summarises the key message.
Gilbert, R.A., Davis, M.H., Gaskell, M.G., Rodd, J.M. (2021) The relationship between sentence comprehension and lexical-semantic retuning. Journal of Memory and Language 116, 104188DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2020.104188
This work, led by Lena Blott uses an eye-tracking method to explore how readers recover after they misinterpret sentences that contain ambiguous words.
Blott, L.M., Rodd, J.M., Ferreira, F., Warren, J.E. (2020). Recovery from misinterpretations during online sentence processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. Advance online publication. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000936
This review paper brings together much of the research conducted in the lab over the last 20 years. It presents a new account of word-meaning access that places semantic disambiguation at its core and integrates evidence from a wide variety of experimental approaches to explain this key aspect of language comprehension.
Rodd, J.M. (2020). Settling into semantic space: An ambiguity-focused account of word-meaning access. Perspectives on Psychological Science 15 (2), 411-427. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691619885860
This work led by Lucy MacGregor (MRC CBU, Cambridge) used combined magnetoencephalography (MEG) and Electroencephalography (EEG) to measure neural responses associated spoken sentences that contained ambiguous words.
MacGregor, L.J., Rodd, J.M., Gilbert, R.A., Hauk,O., Sohoglu, E., Davis, M.H. (2020). The neural time course of semantic ambiguity resolution in speech comprehension. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 32 (3), 403-425. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_01493
The Word Lab at UCL 