CASS is excited to announce an upcoming half-day research seminar on the theme of “Corpus Data and Psycholinguistics”. The event will take place on Thursday 19th May 2016 at 1-5pm in Furness Lecture Theatre 3.
The aim of the event is to bring together researchers with an interest in combining methods from corpus linguistics and psycholinguistics. In particular, there will be a focus on experimental psycholinguistics. It is set to be an exciting afternoon consisting of four 40-minute presentations from both internal and external speakers. Professor Padraic Monaghan from the Department of Psychology will be giving an introduction to computational modelling in psycholinguistics, and I will be presenting my work on investigating the processing of collocation using EEG. Furthermore, Dr Phil Durrant from the University of Exeter will be giving a talk entitled “Revisiting collocational priming”, and Professor Michaela Mahlberg from the University of Birmingham will be discussing the methodological issues associated with combining eye-tracking techniques with corpus data.
You can find out more about these talks from the abstracts below.
Padraic Monaghan, Lancaster University
Computational modelling of corpus data in psycholinguistic studies
Computational models of language learning and processing enable us to determine the inherent structure present in language input, and also the cognitive mechanisms that react to this structure. I will give an introduction to computational models used in psycholinguistic studies, with a particular focus on connectionist models where the structure of processing is derived principally from the structure of the input to the model.
Phil Durrant, University of Exeter
Revisiting collocational priming
Durrant & Doherty (2010) evaluated whether collocations at different levels of frequency exhibit psycholinguistic priming. It also attempted to untangle collocation from the related phenomenon of psychological association by comparing collocations which were and were not associates. Priming was found between high-frequency collocations but associated collocates appeared to exhibit more deep-rooted priming (as reflected in a task designed to reflect automatic, rather than strategic processes) than those which were not associated. This presentation will critically review the 2010 paper in light of more recent work. It will re-evaluate the study itself and suggest ways in which research could be taken forward.
Durrant, P., & Doherty, A. (2010). Are high-frequency collocations psychologically real? Investigating the thesis of collocational priming. Corpus linguistics and linguistic theory, 6(2), 125-155.
Jennifer Hughes, Lancaster University
Investigating the processing of collocation using EEG: A pilot study
In this presentation, I discuss the results of an EEG experiment which pilots a procedure for determining whether or not there is a quantitively distinct brain response to the processing of collocational bigrams compared to non-collocational bigrams. Collocational bigrams are defined as adjacent word pairs which have a high forward transitional probability in the BNC (e.g. crucial point), while non-collocational bigrams are defined as adjacent word pairs which are semantically plausible but are absent from the BNC (e.g. crucial night). The results show that there is a neurophysiological difference in how collocational bigrams and non-collocations bigrams are processed.
Michaela Mahlberg, Kathy Conklin, and Gareth Carrol, University of Birmingham
Exploring corpus-attested patterns in Dickens’s fiction – methodological challenges of using eye-tracking techniques
The study of the relationship between patterns and meanings is a key concern in corpus linguistics. The data that corpus linguists work with, however, only provides a partial picture. In this paper, we will look at how questions of frequencies in corpora can be related to questions raised by data from eye-tracking studies on reading times. We will also discuss challenges of designing experiments to address these questions. As a case study, we focus on examples of patterns identified in Dickens’s fiction, but the methodological issues we address have wider implications beyond the study of literary corpora.
The event is free to attend and is open to both internal and external attendees. If you are an external guest, please email j.j.hughes@lancaster.ac.uk so we know that you intend to come.
We are really looking forward to this event as it will be an exciting opportunity to share ideas regarding the different approaches to using corpus data in experimental psycholinguistics.