Last updated by kprzemek on 2015-01-23. Originally submitted by tomash on 2015-01-20.
Dr Elżbieta Wilczyńska
Nostalgia in the Native Country
The main focus of the talk will be on Native Americans but they will be discussed from the point of view of nostalgia. Usually when we research the first nations of America we concentrate on their identity, history, survival or disappearance, achievements and losses. By employing the concept of nostalgia we can embrace all the issues and understand why Indians can be called nostalgic.
During the talk I will define the concept of nostalgia as it is used in sociology on the basis of the book Yearning for yesterday . The sociology of nostalgia by Fred Davis and will show how it exhibits itself in general and specifically among the Native Americans in the context of identity formation, through the discontinuities of the life cycle of an individual and the whole society /community as well as artistic expression. Svetlana Boym in her book The future of nostalgia states that “nostalgia reappears as a defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals” and I hope to prove that this defensive mechanism has been employed by the Native Americans for a long time.
Mgr Rafał Jończyk
Is the bilingual brain blind to negative affect embedded in L2 sentences?
Bilingualism research has failed to reveal significant language differences in the processing of affective content. However, the evidence to date derives mostly from studies in which single-word affective stimuli are presented out of context, resulting in possibly ambiguous interpretations and failing to capture the complexity of everyday sentence-based communication. In this talk I will present the results of my PhD study that investigated semantic integration of affectively salient stimuli in sentential context in the first- and second-language (L2) of late fluent Polish-English bilinguals living in the UK. The nineteen participants were asked to indicate whether Polish and English sentences ending with a semantically and affectively congruent or incongruent adjective of controlled affective valence made sense whilst undergoing behavioural and electrophysiological recordings. We focused on two event-related potentials (ERPs) waves, N2 and N400, known to index lexical and semantic integration, respectively. We expected increased N400 amplitude for English sentences, due to difficulties in L2 processing, and we anticipated language-valence interactions to index differences in affective processing between languages. Although language did not modulate N400 amplitudes overall, it significantly interacted with affective valence in the N2 range, such that lexical access was reduced for negative sentences in the participants’ L2. This study is the first to demonstrate that bilinguals display reduced access to negative words embedded in naturalistic L2 sentences. This result offers a neurophysiological interpretation for findings reported in previous clinical and linguistic research.
