DR JENNIFER RODD (CPB)
j.rodd@ucl.ac.uk
Project 1: What properties of a speaker’s voice influence how listeners
interpret words?
Understanding natural language is made more difficult by the presence of
ambiguous words such as “cabinet”, which can refer either to a “group of senior
politicians” or a “piece of furniture”. Existing research has shown that the primary
source of information used by listeners to disambiguate these words is the
immediate sentence context (e.g., “the drinks cabinet” vs. “the Conservative
cabinet”). But listeners also use other sources of information to boost the availability
of individual meanings and so make these meanings easier to understand. We have
recently shown that listeners interpret words differently according to who is speaking:
the political meaning of “cabinet” was retrieved more often when spoken by a familiar
male speaker who was strongly associated with politics, compared to an equally
familiar female speaker. This project will explore exactly which properties of voices
influence how words are processed by separately assessing the impact of variables
such as gender, age, regional accent, tone of voice and knowledge of an individual’s
usual speech topics. Such findings would challenge current models of word
recognition which assume that this type of voice information is not involved in
processing word meanings and would suggest that listeners use a rich set of cues to
make speech comprehension easier.
Project 2: The psycholinguistics of puns
Puns have a very specific structure from a psycholinguistic point of view – they rely
on a sentence construction in which both meanings of an ambiguous word are
partially consistent with the sentence context (e.g., “Why were the teacher’s eyes
crossed? Because she could not control her pupils.”).This is in contrast with nonhumorous sentences in which only one meaning is relevant (e.g., “why were the
lawyers eyes crossed? Because she could not control her pupils.”). Very little is
known about why this psycholinguistic property can lead to these sentences being
perceived as ‘funny’. The aim of this project is to try and discover what aspect of the
linguistic processing of a pun causes its ‘funniness’.
I would also consider supervising other projects within the field of language
comprehension, particularly those which focus on the learning mechanisms that
allow listeners/readers to learn and optimise their linguistic representations.