Professor Michaela Mahlberg and Dr Gareth Carrol will be speaking at the CASS Corpus Data and Psycholinguistics Seminar at the University of Lancaster on 19 May 2016.
Their paper titled: 'Exploring corpus-attested patterns in Dickens’s fiction – methodological challenges of using eye-tracking techniques' is a joint paper with Dr Kathy Conklin, Associate Professor in Psycholinguistics at the University of Nottingham.
The study of the relationship between patterns and meanings is a key concern in corpus linguistics. The data that corpus linguists work with, however, only provides a partial picture. In this paper, we will look at how questions of frequencies in corpora can be related to questions raised by data from eye-tracking studies on reading times. We will also discuss challenges of designing experiments to address these questions. As a case study, we focus on examples of patterns identified in Dickens’s fiction, but the methodological issues we address have wider implications beyond the study of literary corpora.