Expedition Uses New Methods in Minority Language Studies
Researchers from HSE University’s Centre for Language and Brain, together with employees of Adyghe State University’s Laboratory of Experimental Linguistics, are conducting an expedition that is unprecedented in Russia: psycholinguistic field research into the Adyghe language and Russian-Adyghe bilingualism in a village in the Republic of Adygea.
Why Understanding of Texts Worsens with Age
Psycholinguists from the Centre for Language and Brain, HSE University, have found that to predict semantic relations between words when reading, older adults use their knowledge of the world instead of grammar more often than young adults. Reliance on the meaning of individual words instead of accurate grammar analysis allows for faster information processing, but sometimes causes misinterpretations. The study has been published by the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.
Predicting Grammatical Properties of Words Helps Us Read Faster
Psycholinguists from the HSE Centre for Language and Brain found that when reading, people are not only able to predict specific words, but also words’ grammatical properties, which helps them to read faster. Researchers have also discovered that predictability of words and grammatical features can be successfully modelled with the use of neural networks. The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE.
The Latest on Human Infants
Professor Emmanuel Dupoux , Paris, Ecole Normale Supérieure ( ENS) will visit the HSE, Moscow for a lecture entitled ‘Quantitative modeling of early language acquisition’ on November, 15, 2013. He shared a few ideas with the HSE news service and spoke about his research interests.