Michaela Mahlberg gives talk on 'Body language in Dickens: Combining corpus linguistic and psycholinguistic evidence'

Michaela Mahlberg gives a talk on ‘Body language in Dickens: Combining corpus linguistic and psycholinguistic evidence’ at the University of Lancaster (UCREL Corpus Research Seminar) on Monday, 26 January.

Abstract

The talk will report on a current research project (joint work with Kathy Conklin and Gareth Carrol) that employs psycholinguistic methods to complement corpus stylistic findings. The project builds on corpus linguistic work on Dickens's techniques of body language presentation (Mahlberg 2013). It investigates the way in which participants read patterns such as with his back to the or his eyes fixed on the. Corpus research suggests that such clusters are crucial to the creation of characters in Dickens, but leaves open the question of the extent to which readers are in fact aware of the textual patterns. Building on methods tested in Mahlberg et al. (2014) and Siyanova-Chanturia et al. (2011), the present project uses eye-tracking experiments to study the way in which clusters are read and how they are embedded in the textual contexts in which they occur.

References

• Mahlberg, M. (2013). Corpus Stylistics and Dickens's Fiction. New York & London: Routledge.
• Mahlberg, M., Conklin, K. and Bisson, M.-J., (2014). Reading Dickens’s characters: Employing psycholinguistic methods to investigate the cognitive reality of patterns in texts, Language and Literature, 23(4), 369-388
• Siyanova-Chanturia, A., Conklin, K., & van Heuven, J.B. (2011). Seeing a phrase “time and again” matters: The role of phrasal frequency in the processing of multiword sequences. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 37, 776-784.