The next talk in the Linguistics colloquium series will be presented by Juhani Järvikivi (University of Alberta) on Friday, February 14th at 3:30 pm in Wilson Hall WP Room. The talk is entitled: Personality and Political Ideology in Language Comprehension.
Abstract:
The last couple of decades of psycholinguistics have uncovered many ways in which context (broadly-understood, linguistic and non-linguistic) constrains and modulates real-time language comprehension. In this talk, I will review some of the recent work in our lab looking at affective and social aspects pertaining to reader/listener and speaker identity in language processing. I will discuss recent data from experiments investigating the extent to which affect (valence, dominance), gender, and participants’ socio-political views modulate the processing of sentences with so-called implicit causality verbs (John feared/frightened Jill, because he/she…). Second, I will discuss work investigating the effects of individual personality traits (Big 5, Disgust) on the processing of spoken sentences with three types of violations/deviations/clashes: morpho-syntactic, semantic, and socialcultural/-pragmatic. These studies take the consideration of ‘context’ a step further, if you will, by asking how real-time language understanding is affected by individual comprehender-inherent factors as well as the social and cultural environment in which language processing (necessarily) takes place.