[Somean] Fwd: SPLaT! Special meeting with Vicky Lai (This Thursday!)

[Kathryn Campbell-Kibler]

This looked So Mean-relevant, so I thought I'd send it along.

-K


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Chigusa Kurumada <kurumada at stanford.edu>
Date: Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 3:57 AM
Subject: SPLaT! Special meeting with Vicky Lai (This Thursday!)
To: splat-teas <splat-teas at lists.stanford.edu>, ling-department
<ling-department at lists.stanford.edu>


Hello!

We are happy to announce our special meeting this week (4/22)!
The speaker is a visiting student Vicky Lai from University of
Colorado at Boulder.

Vicky has been conducting a lot of cool research in the field of
Psycholinguistics
with a special focus on understanding of metaphor.
(Her website: http://verbs.colorado.edu/~laiv/)

She is starting her postdoc in the Neurobiology of Language Group
at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in May.
Before leaving for MPI, she is sharing her research interests with us --
Investigation of metaphor using the brainwave measure of Event-Related
Potentials (ERP)
and the crowd-sourcing method of Amazon Mechanical Turk (MT)!!!

Those who you like:
1) psycholinguistics
2) metaphor
3) brain research
4) Amazon Mechanical Turk
5) tea&snacks
Please join us for this special meeting with Vicky Lai!

Chigusa, Middy, and Tania
----------------------------------------
[WHEN]
Thursday, April 22th
       Tea at 5:15pm
       Talk at 5:30pm

[WHERE]
Margaret Jacks Hall, Bldg. 460, Room 126

[WHO]
Vicky, T. Lai
(Department of Linguistics / Institute of Cognitive Science,
University of Colorado at Boulder)


Title: Understanding Metaphorical Expressions: Conventionality,
Mappings, and Comparison Processes


In this talk, I will present my research on metaphor using the
brainwave measure of Event-Related Potentials (ERP) and the
crowdsourcing method of Amazon Mechanical Turk (MT). In a series of
ERP studies, it was found that understanding conventional metaphorical
expressions needed an initial burst of processing effort, but such
effort was quickly resolved, whereas novel metaphorical expressions
took longer to integrate. In addition, the processing effort for the
conventional metaphorical expressions could be reduced when readers
were first exposed to another instance extracted from the same
metaphor mapping. Moreover, the processing for both conventional and
novel metaphorical expressions was facilitated by comparison thinking
initiated by similes. The MT studies explored whether the factor of
“metaphorical sense frequency”, i.e., how inherently metaphorical one
word is as compared to another, may also play a role in how the brain
interprets metaphorical expressions. The findings showed that the
metaphor sense frequency was reflected in the brainwaves as early as
200 ms, and such frequency information weighs more in novel than
conventional metaphorical contexts. Overall, these findings suggest
that the conceptual mappings may be retrieved and made use of during
the processing of conventional metaphorical expressions, the cognitive
process of comparison is important for comprehending both conventional
and novel metaphorical expressions, and the metaphorical profile of a
word influences metaphorical sentence processing.
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