Psycholinguistics

Today Dr Patrick Bolger (left) showed me round the Centre for Comparative Psycholinguistics in the Arts Building and gave me and my family (who arrived yesterday) an exquisite 90-minute lecture on his work as an applied psycholinguist. We were told which experimentation goes on (such as eye-tracking movements, ERP (event-related brain perception) and which data are collected. Psycholinguistics at the UoA is concerned with "language processing in real time"; the centre not only analyses English but also minority languages of Western Canada. Students get a good impression of how research in linguistics is conducted (experiment protocols, lexical decision methods etc.). Even my son was impressed by Patrick's talk and now considers psycholinguistics as an option for his studies. (Well, this is what he said. There is still some time to decide this.)