My
research is supported by the Warwick Postgraduate Research
Fellowship, and is primarily on phonetic sound symbolism. That is, the link between some property of what a word points
to and the sounds within that word. For example, it appears
that when naming novel objects people tend to create names with front
vowels ("ee") when the object is small and back vowels ("oo") when the
object is big. It may be the case that phonetically symbolic
language was a precursor to modern languages, which are based primarily
on arbitrary assignment of speech sounds.
I am also working on a
side project about whether persistent music player use lessens
cooperation (with James Tripp), and another one involving emotion and
underlying tones (with Malik Refaat).
Conference Presentations
Estes,
Z., Thompson,
P., & Verges, M. (2009, July). Fast cash and slow snakes:Selective responding
to affective words. Presentation
at the
Embodied andSituated
Language Processing
Conference.Rotterdam,
The Netherlands. abstract
Poster Presentations
Thompson, P., & Estes,
Z. (2009,
July). The sound fits the size- Graded sound symbolism for magnitude.
Poster
presented at the 31th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science
Society.
Amsterdam, The Netherlands. poster
Jones, L.,
Pope, A., Reed, E., Thompson, P.,
Cooper, E., & Wilson, K. (2006,
July).
Celebrity recognition priming: Is
association
required? Poster session presented at the annual meeting
of the Cognitive
Science Society, Vancouver, BC. abstract