Three members of the Word Lab, Jenni Rodd, Hannah Betts and Becky Gilbert, will be presenting posters of their research at the International Meeting of the Psychonomic Society which will take place 5-8th May 2016 in Granada, Spain.
The titles of the posters and links to the abstracts can be found below:
PRODUCING PUBLICALLY AVAILABLE WORDMEANING DOMINANCE NORMS FROM EXISTING DATASETS
The aim of this grant is to combine data obtained across ten different experiments to produce up-to-date dominance norms suitable for use in experiments using UK participants.
Many word forms map onto multiple meanings (e.g., “ace”). The current experiments explore the extent to which adults reshape the lexical–semantic representations of such words on the basis of experience, to increase the availability of more recently accessed meanings. A naturalistic web-based experiment in which primes were presented within a radio programme (Experiment 1; N = 1800) and a lab-based experiment (Experiment 2) show that when listeners have encountered one or two disambiguated instances of an ambiguous word, they then retrieve this primed meaning more often (compared with an unprimed control condition). This word-meaning priming lasts up to 40 min after exposure, but decays very rapidly during this interval. Experiments 3 and 4 explore longer-term word-meaning priming by measuring the impact of more extended, naturalistic encounters with ambiguous words: recreational rowers (N = 213) retrieved rowing-related meanings for words (e.g., “feather”) more often if they had rowed that day, despite a median delay of 8 hours. The rate of rowing-related interpretations also increased with additional years’ rowing experience. Taken together these experiments show that individuals’ overall meaning preferences reflect experience across a wide range of timescales from minutes to years. In addition, priming was not reduced by a change in speaker identity (Experiment 1), suggesting that the phenomenon occurs at a relatively abstract lexical–semantic level. The impact of experience was reduced for older adults (Experiments 1, 3, 4) suggesting that the lexical–semantic representations of younger listeners may be more malleable to current linguistic experience.
Authors:
Jennifer M. Rodd, , Zhenguang G. Cai, Hannah N. Betts, Betsy Hanby, Catherine Hutchinson, Aviva Adler
fMRI studies of how the brain processes sentences containing semantically ambiguous words have consistently implicated (i) the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and (ii) posterior regions of the left temporal lobe in processing high-ambiguity sentences. Despite the consistency of these findings there is little consensus about the precise functional contributions of these regions. This article reviews recent findings on this topic and relates them to (i) psycholinguistic theories about the underlying cognitive processes and (ii) general neuro-cognitive accounts of the relevant brain regions. We suggest that the LIFG plays a general role in the cognitive control process that are necessary to select contextually relevant meanings and to reinterpret sentences that were initially misunderstood, but it is currently unclear whether these control processes should best be characterised in terms of specific processes such as conflict resolution and controlled retrieval which are only required for high-ambiguity sentences (and not for low-ambiguity sentences), or whether its function is better characterised in terms of a more general set of ‘unification’ processes that are essential for comprehending all sentences. In contrast to the relatively rapid progress that has been made in understanding the function of the LIFG, we suggest that the contribution of the posterior temporal lobe is less well understood and future work is needed to clarify its role in speech sentence comprehension.
Dr Jennifer Rodd has been appointed as the new Chair of the SLMS Education Domain. She takes over the role from Professor Joyce Harper.
Sir Prof John Tooke, Vice Provost (Health), said “I welcome this appointment and have the utmost confidence in Jenni to lead the Education Domain, and make a strong contribution to nurturing educational leadership across the School, and to facilitating a teaching and learning environment and culture that engages our best researchers in the SLMS educational mission. I am sure that the Domain will continue to go from strength to strength under her leadership.”
In a just-published experiment, we have shown that recent experience with a word in your first language affects how you process that same word some time later in your second language. What’s more, whether this recent experience has a positive or negative effect depends on whether that word has the same or a different meaning in the two languages. Our participants read sentences in their first language, Dutch, that contained words like “film”, which has a similar meaning in both languages, and words like “room”, which confusingly means “cream” in Dutch. When the participants were later asked to decide whether these words were real English words, they were faster with words like “film”, but slower for words like “room”. These results show that the representations of words from different languages are strongly interconnected, and that whenever bilinguals switch between languages, this will influence how easily they can process certain words.
Eva will be presenting a poster about her research at the Psycholinguistics in Flanders 2015 conference in Marche En Famenne, Belgium on 21st-22nd May.
The title and a link to the poster can be found below:
Three PhD students in the Word Lab will be presenting posters of their research at the UCL PPG Cumberland Lodge Conference which will take place 27th-28th April. Links to these posters can be found below:
Following the Cumberland Lodge conference this week, we are pleased to announce that Eva was named the runner up in the poster competition. Congratulations, Eva!
The Word Lab at UCL 