On Friday, September 30th, the Institute of Psychology welcomed Professor Marcus Taft from the University of New South Wales to conduct academic exchanges.
Professor Marcus Taft, Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, is an expert in the field of visual word recognition and processing, which he has been conducting experiments on these topics for over 40 years. Particularly known for his work on polymorphemic and polysyllabic, Prof. Taft is a strong advocate of a cross-language rule that complex words are always decomposed into their components during reading.
This time, he presented a colloquium on the way phonology might be activated when reading Chinese and English, aiming to give a theoretical framework for comparing the similarities and differences between processing alphabetic script as in English and logographic script as in Chinese. His presentation aroused a heated discussion among professors and students, and several put forward interesting questions. Prof. Liu Xun, the Deputy Director of the Institute of Psychology, also gave enlightening comments on the topic.
After the colloquium, Prof. Li Shu, PI of the Key Laboratory of Behavioral Sciences, gave his newly published book, The Equate-to-Differentiate Way of Decision Making,to Prof. Taft as a gift, and acknowledged the help Prof. Taft’s gave in improving the English expression.
In the afternoon, Prof. Taft had a research meeting with Prof. Xingshan Li’s research group. During the meeting, they exchanged recent research findings from both labs, and discussed some interesting topics of their joint research interest. The discussion inspired some new research ideas. Prof. Taft and Professor Li also set up several new projects for future cooperation.
