56th Language at Edinburgh lunch

The Language@Edinburgh Lunch is a bi-monthly opportunity to present your work to an interdisciplinary audience in an intimate and feedback-rich setting, all while enjoying a buffet lunch.

Posters are welcome on any area of language research, including philosophy, from both postgraduate students and academic staff.

If you would like to present your language-related research, please email us with a title and an abstract by Thursday 9 February and a digital version of your poster by Monday 13 February, which we will print for you.

We would ask you to mind these few guidelines when preparing your abstract:

• aim at about 100-300 words in length (including any example sentences and references)
• if linguistic examples are glossed, they should follow the common Leipzig Glossing Rules
• the abstract may be sent within an email message or as an attachment (doc/docx or txt are fine)
• if not using plain text, kindly refrain from using formatting that is prone to causing errors or getting lost between conversions (e.g., tabs, small caps; automatic indentation, bullets and numbering).

Posters

Individual differences in perspective taking: inhibition and switching across the lifespan - Madeleine Long

Work on the role of executive functions (EF) in regulating communicative perspective taking has primarily focused on inhibitory control in younger adults, the results of which are mixed. Less consideration has been given to comparing inhibition with attentional switching capacities in mediating perspective taking across the lifespan, where cognitive differences may be especially relevant. In a referential communication task varying the presence of a visual competitor in common versus privileged ground, we find Age X Perspective X EF interactions for both inhibition and switching. Younger adults’ perspective-taking was influenced more by inhibition, and older adults’ perspective-taking more by switching.

Perception of political language on Twitter: salience and recall (LTM) - José Segovia Martín (Universidad Complutense de Madrid/University of Edinburgh)

Did any political party manage to generate either greater salience or recall of their tweets during the last electoral campaigns in Spain? Which variables have statistically significant relationship with the salience of tweets? We propose a quantitative approach to the political discourse at the online social network Twitter. The main objective of this research is to determine some of the factors that may be influencing the perception of political language on this network. Our research reveals significant influence of the variables context (P = 0.0081) and discourse-level topic (P <0.0001) on the perceptual salience of the tweets. Furthermore, we found that the perceptual salience (P = 0.0186) has a significant influence on the recall (LTM) of the tweets, although some inversions were observed in extremely salient scenarios.

Designing an educational video-game using idioms to assist adolescents with Asperger Syndrome in non-literal language comprehension - Vanessa Zervogianni

Pragmatic difficulties experienced by people on the autistic spectrum can provoke difficulties in their social integration and life enjoyment. Their associated impairment in making inference from social and linguistic context makes non literal language processing challenging for them. There are no technological interventions that address idiom comprehension for this population. In order to fill this gap, we designed an educational video game to assist children with Asperger syndrome through a combined social stories and scaffolding strategy. The system was developed based on Participatory Design and User Centred approaches, involving the target population, typically developing children and experts. The results indicate the potential of an educational game to teach a strategy for idiom comprehension using contextual information.

Conceptual accessibility and subject omission in Mandarin Chinese - Yangzi Zhou, Holly Branigan & Martin Pickering

Substantial psycholinguistic evidence has demonstrated that, animacy, as a striking semantic feature reflecting conceptual accessibility, could exert an effect on how speakers construct their utterance (e.g. Gennari, Mirkovic, & MacDonald 2012). Besides, similarity between the to-be-described elements could also constrain language production (e.g. Meyer 1996; Smith and Wheeldon 1999). However, limited studies examined the accessibility and/or the similarity effect in Mandarin. Hsiao, Gao & MacDonald (2014) is one of the very few studies which addressed this research question. Their results suggested that more subject omissions occurred when the to-be-described entities were semantically similar than the dissimilar condition. However, these findings were questionable because first, the materials design was biased (specifically, inconsistent introductory pictures before the target picture). Second, the nature of producing missing argument remains unclear — only patient’s animacy, but not agent’s animacy was manipulated. Also, some confounding factors were not controlled well. Our on-going study is designated to replicate and enlarge Hsiao et al., (2014). More conditions with a larger set of carefully controlled materials will be included. Specifically, both agent’s animacy and patient’s animacy are manipulated, and Patient is made more salient in the contextual stories. Plausibility of the actions, similarity and associativity between the entities are all controlled. It is predicted that if there is a saliency effect, more passive (SOV) and ba-structures (SOV) will occur than the canonical SVO structure because in those structures, patient appears at the beginning of the sentence as subject. Besides, if there is an interaction between animacy and saliency, then the saliency effect will be enhanced when the patient is also animate. Different patterns will also be shown regarding whether subject omission is due to similarity between the entities or animacy.

Contact

Candice Mathers

Language at Edinburgh Lunch committee

Joachim Fainberg, Andres Karjus, Madeleine Long, Candice Mathers, Joana Ribeiro, Eva Schnelten

Further information

The Language at Edinburgh Lunch is made possible through funding from the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences and the Human Communication Research Centre, with the intent to facilitate interdisciplinary language research at the University of Edinburgh.