On the afternoon of Thursday 19th May 2016, CASS held its first ever psycholinguistics seminar which brought together researchers from both linguistics and psychology. The theme of the seminar was “Corpus Data and Psycholinguistics”, with a particular focus on experimental psycholinguistics.
The afternoon consisted of four 40-minute presentations which covered a range of different experimental methods including eye-tracking and EEG. Interestingly, the notion of collocation also emerged as a strong theme throughout the presentations. Different types of collocation were addressed, including bigrams, idioms, and compounds, and this prompted thought-provoking discussions about the nature of collocation and the relationship between psycholinguistic results and the different statistical measures of collocation strength.
The first presentation was delivered by Professor Padraic Monaghan from the Psychology Department at Lancaster University. In this presentation, Padraic provided an engaging introduction to computational modelling in psycholinguistics, focusing mainly on connectionist models where the input determines the structure of processing. This talk prompted a particularly interesting observation about the relationship between connectionist models and parts-of-speech tags in corpora.
In the second presentation, Dr Phil Durrant from the University of Exeter provided a critical perspective on his own earlier work into whether or not psycholinguistic priming is evident in collocations at different levels of frequency, and on the distinction between the related notions of collocation and psychological association. This presentation also provided a really interesting insight into the different ways in which corpus linguistics and psychological experimentation can be combined in psycholinguistic studies. This really helped to contextualise the studies reported in the other presentations within the field of psycholinguistics.
After a short break, I presented the results of the first of several studies which will make up my PhD thesis. This initial study pilots a procedure for using EEG to determine whether or not the brain is sensitive to the transition probabilities between words. This was an excellent opportunity for me to gain feedback on my work and I really appreciate the input and suggestions for further reading that I received from participants at this event.
The final presentation of the afternoon was delivered by Professor Michaela Mahlberg and Dr Gareth Carroll from the University of Birmingham. This presentation drew upon eye-tracking data from a study exploring literary reading in order to pinpoint the methodological issues associated with combining eye-tracking techniques with literary corpora, and with corpus data more generally.
With such an interesting series of talks sharing the theme of “Corpus Data and Psycholinguistics”, the CASS psycholinguistics seminar proved to be a very successful event. We would like to thank the presenters and all of the participants who attended the seminar for their contribution to the discussions, and we are really looking forward to hosting similar seminars in the near future.