This collection consists of data from psycholinguisic experiments. This research explores the contribution of learning mechanisms to meaning selection in healthy adults. For example, someone who had recently taken up gardening or card-playing could potentially make meaning selection easier for “spade” by using their recent experience to make better predictions about which meaning is likely to be encountered in the future. Additional experiments will explore whether listeners take into account the speaker’s identity or accent to aid their interpretation of ambiguous words. This research will form the basis for future attempts to characterise the precise difficulties of individuals/groups with comprehension deficits.To understand speech listeners must accurately and rapidly select the correct meaning for each word they encounter. For example they might need to determine, on the basis of sentence context, whether the word “spade” refers to a digging tool or a card suit. Despite the apparent ease with which listeners usually accomplish this task, meaning selection is known to be cognitive demanding, and is a source of particular difficultly for individuals/groups with comprehension deficits.

Psycho-linguistic experiments (specific details provided in individual documents); A combination of lab-based and web-based experiments measured the impact of different types of experience with ambiguous words on how they are processed after a delay of minutes, days or weeks.