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Other Nottingham events

Words words words

Past event - 2017
15 May Doors 6:30pm. Event 7-9:30pm.
Purecraft, 13 St Peter's Gate,
Nottingham NG1 2JF
Sold Out!
TICKETS AVAILABLE ON DOOR. Have you ever wondered why we say “a picture is worth one thousand words”? And if that is true, how many do we need to create a mental image? Would emoticons make the task easier or would they just work against us?
Three brilliant researchers will provide answers to these questions as they tell us all about how your mind’s eye can really see, how we learn languages and how humour can affect everything we say.

Navigating real and mental space: Language and the “Mind’s Eye”

Fabio Parente (Research / Teaching Associate)
Whether we are reading about a journey through Middle Earth or asking for directions in an unfamiliar city, language creates representations in our mind, perceived by many as more or less vivid mental images. We have a subjective experience of these representations, we move through them and use them to maintain stable models of narratives or of the world we inhabit. My research tries to find ways to explore these representations, how they are built, and how we can use them to develop novel technologies.

Words go together like “bread and butter”: The rapid, automatic learning of patterns of words

Dr. Kathryn Conklin (Associate Professor in Psycholinguistics)
Most native English speakers would say that two things go together like “bread and butter” and not like “butter and bread”. Such linguistic patterns are merely conventional, but are not fundamental to communicating meaning. Importantly, they account for as much as half of spoken language. Our research explores how quickly people learn novel patterns (“wires and pipes”) by monitoring their eye movements in the natural context of reading a short story.

Sarcasm and emoticons? How useful! ;)

Dr. Dominic Thompson (Assistant Professor in Psycholinguistics, Faculty of Arts)
First I will assure you that sarcasm is really worth studying! I'll discuss the emotional effects sarcasm can have, and if it could even be useful in some situations. One issue to think about is whether the indirectness of sarcasm makes it harder to understand. I will also look at emoticons and the different ways people use them :) Are they just fun little decorations for your messages? Are they destroying the language as we know it? I’ll argue that they can actually be useful - let’s see if you agree...
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