Masterclass presented by the Sydney Centre for Language Research, Systemic Functional Linguistics Research Node

Using SFL to construct narratives for experimental language research

In the last 50 years, both psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics have provided crucial breakthroughs for understanding the cognitive bases of language. Despite this, both fields have been undermined by a tradeoff between ecological validity (i.e., the degree to which tasks reflect the conditions of everyday communication) and experimental control (the manipulation of fine-grained variables, which is typically achieved by matching lists of decontextualized words and sentences). To overcome this problem, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) has been used for constructing carefully matched but fully naturalistic narratives usable in experimental settings. In this seminar, after a general overview, students will be guided to assemble two statistically comparable texts to be used in experimental language research investigating particular neural systems.

Bionote

Piergiorgio Trevisan is Lecturer in English Language and Translation at the Department of Languages and Literatures, Communication, Education and Social Studies, University of Udine, Italy. His research interests are in the area of discourse analysis, stylistics, neurolinguistics.  

Participants should bring their own computer to the masterclass.

Venue

Social Sciences Building 441 (SSB 441)