Dr Jennifer Rodd & Dr Garry Cai (Experimental Psychology)
j.rodd@ucl.ac.uk; z.cai@ucl.ac.uk
How do listeners keep track of what words mean in multi-speaker situations?
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 listeners are biased to retrieve those meanings that they have recently
heard. This form of ‘word-meaning priming’ will make such words easier to understand when they
occur multiple times within the same conversation, as long as they keep being used with the same
meaning throughout the conversation. In this project we will explore how listeners behave when they
hear two different speakers who each use a different meaning of an ambiguous word. Are the
listeners able to keep track of these differences in how the two speakers use the word?
This project is open to one student, who will be expected to set up a lab-based experiment
that will involve three participants interacting with each other. The student will need to modify our
current experimental paradigm to make it suitable for this multi-speaker environment.