Last updated by kprzemek on 2018-03-23. Originally submitted by tomash on 2018-03-20.
WA Friday Lectures (now called WA Friday Lunch Talks) are monthly meetings with presentations of current research results or research in progress by WA faculty, staff, or PhD students. They are usually held in room 316A on Fridays at 1:30 PM. Each talk is of 30 minutes (+ 10 minutes for discussion).
Anna Ewert
Does bilingualism hamper lexical access in highly proficient bilinguals?
Bilinguals are thought to be disadvantaged in their lexical processing. It has been demonstrated that bilinguals have lower semantic fluency in their dominant language than monolinguals (Gollan, Montoya & Werner, 2002; Portocarrero, Burright & Donovick, 2007) and they name pictures in their dominant language more slowly than monolinguals (Gollan et al., 2005; Ivanova & Costa, 2008). The consensus among researchers nowadays seems to be that that lexical access in bilinguals is language non-selective, i.e. both languages of a bilingual are activated down to the phonological form even if only one language is being used (e.g. Kroll et al., 2015, de Groot & Starreveld, 2015). The evidence for non-selectivity comes from interference caused by distractors from another language (Hermans et al., 1998) and from facilitation in cognate processing (Costa et al., 2000). Non-selective lexical access is considered to be the main cause of the bilingual lexical disadvantage as non-target language words interfere while competing for selection. An alternative account holds that weaker links between bilingual lexical representations are responsible for the disadvantage (Gollan et al., 2005).
However, more recent research on executive function shows that bilingualism is not a categorical variable (Luk & Bialystok, 2013), which means that the interplay of different factors related to bilingual language proficiency and usage may lead to different outcomes in different participant populations (Ooi et al., 2018).
In this talk I am going to discuss the results of studies showing that highly-proficient Polish L2 users of English are actually advantaged in their L1 lexical processing and venture several plausible explanations of the mechanism underlying this advantage.
Signs and symbols in pre-modern texts: multimodality, visual discourse and Latin abbreviations in Middle English manuscripts
Dr Justyna Rogos-Hebda, Department of the History of English
This presentation is a report on a recently-completed post-doc project on the evolution of forms and functions of Latin abbreviations in Middle English literary manuscripts (a NCN funded project no. UMO-2012/05/B/HS2/03996). The project develops a cross-disciplinary approach to Latin abbreviations in Middle English literary manuscripts, conceptualising the phenomenon in question as a feature of manuscript multimodality, i.e. the use of different modes (or media) in the creation of meaning (e.g. Maxwell 2016; Amsler 2016), and medieval multiliteracies, which account for the impact of multimodal texts on manners of communication (cf. Cope and Kalantzis 2009). In traditional scholarship (e.g. Cappelli 1899; Traube 1907; Derolez 2003) abbreviations in Latin and vernacular manuscripts have been construed as ideograms which signify onto the morpholexical plane, and belong to the orthographic-linguistic layer of the handwritten page, but more recent approaches to medieval multimodality (e.g. Maxwell 2016; Amsler 2016) and visual pragmatics of pre-modern texts (e.g. Machan 2011; Carroll et al. 2013) have demonstrated the anachronism of separating the textual and visual layers in analyses of manuscripts as ’’visual texts” (Machan 2011). This presentation focuses on Latin abbreviations in late Middle English literary manuscripts, as loci of interactions between text and image, Latin and English (e.g. Wright 2001), linguistic and pragmatic functions (e.g. Erman 2001; Lutzky 2009), material context (e.g. Jucker and Pahta 2011) and cultural codes (Posner 2004). It demonstrates how the evolving forms and functions of those ”half-graphic objects” (Traube 1909) in a corpus of late Middle English literary manuscripts impact the readers’ construal of meaning of the text before their eyes. Bringing together traditional approaches of manuscript studies and historical linguistics, along with frameworks developed for contemporary image-based, digitally transmitted communication, i.e. multimodality theory, visual rhetoric and visual pragmatics, the presentation will also point to the links between medieval manuscript-based communication and contemporary image-based multimodality.
References:
Amsler, Mark. 2016. Multimodality and Medieval Multimodalities. Medieval/ Digital Multimodalities. Seminar for the New Chaucer Society2016. http://dhmedievalist.com/scalar/medievaldigital-multimodalities/multimodality-and-medieval-multimodalities
Camille, Michael. 1985. ’’Seeing and Reading: Some Visual Implications of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy”, Art History 8: 26-32.
Cappelli, Adriano. 1899. Lexicon abbreviaturarum dizionario di abbreviature Latine ed Italiane.
Carroll, Ruth, Matti Peikola, Hanna Salmi, Mari-Lisa Varila, Janne Skaffari, and Risto Hiltunen. 2013.
“Pragmatics on the Page. Visual Text in Late Medieval English Books”. European Journal of English
Studies 17(1): 54-71.
Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis. 2009. ’’Multiliteracies: New Literacies, New Learning”. Pedagogies: An International Journal 4: 164–195.
Derolez, Albert C. 2003. The Paleography of Gothic Manuscript Books: From the Twelfth to the Early Sixteentg Century. Cambridge: CUP.
Erman, Britt. 2001. “Pragmatic Markers Revisited with a Focus on 'You Know' in Adult and Adolescent
Talk”. Journal of Pragmatics 33(9): 1337-1359.
http:// www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S03782166000006674
Jucker, Andreas H. and Päivi Pahta. 2011. “Communicating manuscripts: Authors, scribes, readers, listeners and communicating characters”, in: Andreas H. Jucker and Päivi Pahta(eds.), Communicating early English manuscripts, Cambridge, 3-10.
Lutzky, Ursula. 2009. Discourse markers in Early Modern English, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Machan, Tim William. 2011. “The Visual Pragmatics of Code-Switching in Late Middle English
Literature”, in: Herbert Schendl and Laura Wright (eds.), Code-Switching in Early English. Berlin and
Boston: Mouton de Gruyter, 303-333.
Maxwell, Kate. 2016 Beyond Sound, Image, and Text: The (More) Hidden Modes of the Manuscript. Medieval/ Digital Multimodalities. Seminar for the New Chaucer Society2016.
http://dhmedievalist.com/scalar/medievaldigitalmultimodalities/medievaldigital-multimodalities
Posner, Roland. 2004. „Basic Tasks of Cultural Semiotics”, in: Gloria Withalm and Josef Wallmannsberger (eds.), Signs of power – Power of signs. Essays in Honor of Jeff Bernard. Vienna: INST, 56-89.
Traube, Ludwig. 1907. Nomina Sacra: Versuch einer Geschichte der christlichen Kürzung. München: C.H: Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung.
Wright, Laura. 2000. “Bills, accounts, inventories: Everyday trilingual activities in the business world of later medieval England”, in: D. A. Trotter (ed.), Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain, Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 149–156.
