Speaker: Prof Marcus Taft

Time：10:00 am, September 30, 2016

Venue: Meeting Room Level 5, South Building 

Abstract:
The focus of the colloquium he will be presenting in Beijing is the way in which phonology might be activated when reading English and Chinese, with consideration given to the nature of the phonological representation involved. The goal is to provide a useful theoretical framework for thinking about the similarities and differences between the processing of an alphabetic script such as English and the logographic script of Chinese in relation to the role of phonology in reading.

Speaker's Introduction:
Prof Marcus Taft has been conducting experiments in the area of visual word recognition for over 40 years and is particularly known for his work on polymorphemic and polysyllabic word recognition during reading. He has been a strong advocate of the idea that complex words are always decomposed into their components during reading, and has extended such an idea beyond English to other languages, including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

After receiving his PhD at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, Prof Taft spent time at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in a post-doctoral capacity. Since the early 1980s, he has been based in the School of Psychology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. His work on visual word processing has been acknowledged by his election as a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.