COURSES WE OFFER - 1 MA
MA Seminar (2017-2019)
Brain, language and creativity
Karolina Rataj, Ph.D.
This seminar is designed for students interested in how people comprehend language, with a special focus on understanding novel, creative utterances. We will discuss the processes involved in language comprehension in various perspectives, including the role of memory and attention. Several classes will be devoted to learning how language is represented in the brain and how these representations are processed when people understand novel meanings. To better understand results of experimental studies on language, students will be acquainted with selected experimental methods (e.g., reaction times or event-related potentials) currently used to investigate verbal creativity and language processing in real time. This seminar will also give students a chance to conduct a small-scale study on a selected aspect of language comprehension. Students will receive one-to-one advice on how to design the study, report its results, and organize the MA thesis. Credit requirements include participation in in-class discussions based on reading assignments, short in-class presentations of published research with a special focus on the interpretation of reported results, and progress on the MA project. Students with keen interest in psycholinguistics, language comprehension, and creativity will benefit most from the seminar.
Please note that participants of this seminar are strongly encouraged, though not required, to join the MA program in Applied Cognitive Linguistics, which can considerably facilitate the work on the MA project.
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Language processing
Agnieszka Lijewska, Ph.D.
This aim of this course is to introduce you to the knowledge on how the mind processes language. In the course you will become familiar with a number of hypotheses on how language production and comprehension work. We will see what reaction times, eye movement data and other empirical findings can tell us about how the language processing in the mind works. On the basis of psycholinguistic literature we will try to learn how the human mind comprehends words, sentences and discourse. We will discuss the processes which underlie reading, speech production and comprehension.
Research methods
Karolina Rataj, Ph.D.
The aim of this course is to familiarize the students with the basic knowledge of planning, designing and performing an experiment, as well as analyzing the results. Basic notions such as variables, validity, reliability, scales of measurement or ethics will be presented in relation to psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic research. Furthermore, basic statistical analyses will be discussed. At the end of the course students will be able to read and evaluate research reported in scientific journals, formulate good research hypotheses and select research methods to test them, design a simple psycholinguistic experiment, as well as select and perform basic statistical analyses such as t-test or ANOVA to analyze the results.
Bilingualism and multilingualism
Agnieszka Lijewska, Ph.D.
This aim of this course is to introduce you to the knowledge on how the mind processes languages in bilinguals and multilinguals. In the course students will become familiar with a number of hypotheses on how languages are stored and processed in the mind and how that might be important to language learners/users. We will see what reaction times, eye movement data and other empirical findings can tell us about how the multilingual mind works. On the basis of psycholinguistic literature we will try to learn if languages known to an individual speaker take separate compartments in the mind or if they form a single, unitary system. We will also discuss how the multiple languages influence each other and how they can be kept separate.
I can read it in your eyes: Introduction to eye-tracking research in psycholinguistics
Agnieszka Lijewska, Ph.D.
Eye-tracking (measuring the eye activity) is growing in popularity in many research fields e.g. cognitive psychology, medicine, ergonomics, engineering and many more. It has been used in many devices we use every day e.g. in smartphones, computer monitors, etc. The main aim of this seminar is to introduce students to eye-tracking as a method of studying language comprehension. During this course students will learn the basics of human vision and eye-tracking research. We will discuss the intricacies of the bilingual mind as revealed by the study of bilingual speakers’ eye movements. Special emphasis will be placed on the use of eye-tracking to study speech recognition and reading.
Affect/language interface: How emotions prime language comprehension
Katarzyna Bromberek-Dyzman, D.Litt.
This course aims at presenting most recent interdisciplinary research on language/emotion interface. Although emotions permeate communication, constantly coloring our perception, and instantly gearing our comprehension, no language theory has accounted for how/when emotion and language interact to impart their respective communicative contents. Recent research has just started to explore the dynamics and chronometry of emotion/language interactions, and shows that emotional markers enter linguistic contents processing rapidly, merely 100 milliseconds post stimulus onset, and profoundly alter the patterns of linguistic import processing.
We will study most recent research (theoretical, and empirical) on the mind/brain dynamics in emotional, and verbal processing. Our explorations are settled at three distinct levels: (i) behavioral, concerned with verbal and nonverbal means of manifesting emotional significance; (ii) mental, dedicated to the inferential heuristics involved in emotion communication and comprehension; and (iii) neuro-physiological, exploring the brain mechanics underpinning affect/language processing. We will explore the mechanisms, and processes involved in affect-permeated verbal contents comprehension, together with the affect specific ‘chemistry’ and ‘electricity’, and the proactive brain dynamics underpinning comprehension in general, and affective significance comprehension in specific.