OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Substantial research has focused on the relationship between spelling and sound, but we know little about the relationship between spelling and meaning in alphabetic writing systems. I will present the results of computational analyses and behavioural experiments demonstrating that spellings in English tend to be reserved for particular meaningful functions. Further, skilled readers assimilate these meaningful regularities and capitalize on them when they read and write. Finally, using pilot data from an artificial language learning experiment, I will attempt to shed some light on how and why spellings change over time.
