This paper was recently published in Journal of Cognition
This work was led by Dr Lena Blott, who recently left the lab to take up a position at the University of Mannheim
Category: New Publication
This paper recently came out in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
This work was led By Dr Rachael Hulme, who has very recently moved to a lectureship at Herriot Watt University.
This paper came out in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
It was led by Dr Matthew Mak, based at the University of York.
This work explores how we track and adjust our knowledge about word meanings as instances of a word are encountered, with particular focus on the role of sleep in this process. In Experiment 1, participants encountered low-ambiguity words (e.g., bathtub) in sentences that biased their meanings towards a specific interpretation (e.g., bathtub-slip vs. bathtub-relax). In Experiment 2, participants encountered word-class ambiguous words (e.g., loan) in sentences where the words were used in their dispreferred word class (e.g., “He will loan me money”). Both experiments showed that such sentential experience influenced later interpretation and usage of the words more after a night’s sleep than a day awake
We interpret these results as evidence for a general role of episodic memory in language comprehension such that new episodic memories are formed every time a sentence is comprehended, and these memories contribute to lexical processing next time the word is encountered, as well as potentially to the fine-tuning of long-term lexical knowledge.
This priming study was led by Dr Eva Poort, looking at how very recent experience with words (including cognates and interlingual homographs) in the L2 of Dutch-English bilinguals influenced their processing of related words in their L1.
Poort, E. D, & Rodd, J. M. (2022). Cross-lingual priming of cognates and interlingual homographs from L2 to L1. Glossa Psycholinguistics, 1(1). http://dx.doi.org/10.5070/G601147
This work follows up earlier work by Eva on this topic:
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
Poort, E. D., & Rodd, J. M. (2017). The cognate facilitation effect in bilingual lexical decision is influenced by stimulus list composition. Acta Psychologica, 180, 52-63. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2017.08.008
Poort, E. D., Warren, J. E.,& Rodd, J. M. (2016). Recent experience with cognates and interlingual homographs in one language affects subsequent processing in another language. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 19 (1), 206-212.
This paper, which was led by Adam Curtis (Univeristy of York) as part of an ESRC grant awarded to Prof Gareth Gaskell (York) and Prof Jenni Rodd (UCL) has been published in Cognition and can be accessed here.
In three pre-registered experiments, participants were exposed to non-homonym targets (e.g., “balloon”) in sentences that biased interpretation towards a specific aspect of the word’s meaning (e.g., balloon‑helium vs. balloon-float). After a ~ 10–30 min delay access to the primed aspect of the word’s meaning was enhanced.
These findings show that similar ‘word-meaning priming’ effects, that had previously only been shown for homonyms (e.g., bark-dog vs bark-tree) are far more general than previously thought, and sugest that episodic sentence memory plays a key role in comprehension.
Becky Gilbert and Jenni Rodd have published set of dominance norms for ambiguous words in the Journal of Cognition. These were produced by collating data from across a number of different experiments to construct a dataset of 29,542 data points for 243 spoken ambiguous words from UK participants.
This includes resources to help other researchers code word-association responses to ambiguous words in a semi-automated manner, saving researcher time and improving coding consistency. We hope that researchers will add their own data to this database further improving the precision of our dominance estimates.
Gilbert, R. A., & Rodd, J. M. (2022). Dominance Norms and Data for Spoken Ambiguous Words in British English. Journal of Cognition, 5(1): 4, pp. 1–14. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/joc.194
The Word Lab at UCL 