MARCS Monday Meeting (MMM) - 12th August

MARCS Monday Meeting (MMM) Room BA-3.G.55, Bankstown campus

Join us at the next MMM on Monday 12th August 2019

Topic: Psycholinguistics in the field: a report on the MARCS expedition to Towet village, PNG

Speakers: Dr Alba Tuninetti & Dr Hannah Sarvasy

In order to ensure that psycho and neurolinguistic work is ecologically valid and reliable, researchers must extend their scope beyond the Westernized laboratory, institute and university settings and beyond major world languages.

We report on our field trip to a remote village on the Huon peninsula in Papua New Guinea, where speakers of the Nungon language participated in three psycholinguistic experiments:

1. a mobile EEG task in which participants listened to Nungon clause chains including or lacking switch-reference violations;
2. an eye-tracking task targeting switch-reference markers in clause chains; and
3. a word learning task, where participants were asked to learn novel words associated with novel objects that varied based on the narrator.

Topic: Affective responses to musical harmony in PNG

Speakers: Dr Andy Milne and Eline Smit

Abstract: Music is an essential part of most cultures and is commonly considered to be strongly associated with emotion. The extent to which associations between specific musical features and specific emotions are cross-cultural is, however, widely debated. Two important cultural mediators are familiarity with the musical system itself (statistical expectations) and associative learning resulting from consistent cultural uses of musical features. Both these mechanisms appear to play a significant role in music-related emotion, but prior studies have struggled to control for these factors. In part, this is because it is increasingly difficult to find participants who have not been exposed to Western music and/or its cultural context, and so research has often focused on testing Western music on Western-enculturated participants. By testing non-Western communities in a remote area in Papua New Guinea, who have had differing levels of exposure to Western music and its cultural context, it will be possible to examine whether associations between specific musical features and emotions are learned through longitudinal exposure or might be cross-cultural.

The success of our setups highlights the necessity of existing relationships with the community, proactive organization with community members, and experimenter adaptability.

Thank you for your continued attendance at the MMM's.  Let's keep the momentum going.

MARCS staff and students are reminded that all meetings and workshops have an important role in building and maintaining the sense of community which is central to the success of MARCS as a cooperative and energetic research institute.  Your attendance is both welcomed and expected.

The zoom ID is: 627 146 998. Link to zoom https://uws.zoom.us/j/627146998