Jennifer Rodd
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University of Cambridge
Jennifer Mary Rodd | |
|---|---|
| Alma mater | University of Cambridge University of Edinburgh |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | University College London University of Cambridge |
| Thesis | Semantic representation and lexical competition : evidence from ambiguity (2001) |
Jennifer Mary Rodd is a British psychologist who is Professor of Cognitive Psychology at University College London. Her research considers understanding of language and how to improve the processing of ambiguous words.
Rodd studied nature sciences at the University of Cambridge.[citation needed] She moved to the University of Edinburgh for graduate studies, where she specialised in cognitive sciences. She returned to Cambridge for her doctorate, where she investigated lexical complexities.[1] Her experiments showed that while words with multiple related senses are recognised faster, words with multiple unrelated meanings are recognised more slowly due to competition between meanings.
Rodd returned to the University of Cambridge as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Experimental Psychology. She then moved to University College London as a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow.[citation needed]
Research and career
Rodd works in experimental psychology at University College London, where she leads the BSc in psychology.[2][3] The lab studies how children and adults learn new words, how people identify the parts of a word that have meaning, and why some people are better at understanding words.[2] She has examined how listeners interpret ambiguous words based on a speaker's accent. British participants are more likely to choose British meanings of ambiguous words (e.g. “bonnet” as a car hood), but this preference shifts when the speaker sounds American.[4] Even when the target words are spoken in a neutral accent, listeners’ interpretations are influenced by the surrounding accent context. This indicates that they rely on the perceived identity of the speaker rather than just the sound of the word.[4] Her research indicates listeners automatically and subtly use accent-based knowledge to interpret meaning.[4]