How do listeners use their past experience to improve access to word meanings? 2nd December 12-1

You are invited to a talk on Wednesday 2 December by Jennifer Rodd, UCL, who will present a talk entitled "How do listeners use their past experience to improve access to word meanings?".

Date: 2 December 2015

Time: 12:00-1:00pm

Venue: Baines Wing 2.10

With coffee/tea and cake in the Linguistics foyer after the talk.

Abstract: To correctly understand any sentence we must pick out the elements of meaning intended by the speaker and ignore other possible meanings of the words. For example the word BARK should be understood very differently in the phrases “the dogs BARK” and “the tree BARK”. Research over the last 40 years has focused on two important cues that help us solve this task: we are biased to select those word meanings that are (i) more frequent overall in our language, and (ii) consistent with the immediate sentence context. For example in the sentence “I picked up the blue PEN” these two cues act together to make it easy to reject the “animal enclosure” meaning of PEN. In this talk I suggest that these two cues alone are unlikely to explain the speed and accuracy within which word meanings are routinely accessed. I suggest that listeners use a much wider range of experience-based cues. Specifically I present a range of experiments (both lab-based and web-based) that demonstrate that listeners’ interpretation of ambiguous words is influenced by both their individual recent and longer-term experiences with these specific words, such that more recently encountered meanings are more readily available. In addition our experiments show that listeners can use their knowledge of how differently accented speaker groups (e.g., American vs. British) use word to preferentially access the meanings more likely to be used by particular speakers.