Open to the general public!
A talk, next Monday, November 21st, 2016, from 3:00 pm-4:00 pm
Location: Landmark College, Admin Auditorium, 19 River Rd. South, Putney
Title: “Word Meaning, Emotion, and Reading Style”
by Dr. Chris Westbury, Professor of Psychology, University of Alberta, Canada
Description: Reading is a complex activity. When we read, we are not simply decoding letters into words, but simultaneously updating a multi-dimensional model of the topic we are reading about, necessarily involving not only linguistic skills, but also memory, anticipation, imagination, and the ability to model sensations in multiple sensory modalities. There are large individual differences in our sensory experiences during reading, with some readers relying on visualizing what they are reading about, some experiencing reading as an experience of hearing the words they are reading, and some attesting to a strong emotional response to written texts. In this talk, Dr. Westbury will focus on the emotional aspect of word reading, presenting evidence showing that there are measurable individual differences in reading ability that are attributable to emotion, and discussing recent experimental and computational evidence suggesting that the coding of word meanings may be largely dependent on the emotional tone of words.
For more info, see: https://www.landmark.edu/calendar/event/word-meaning-emotion-and-reading-style