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
Many, if not most, words in English and other languages have multiple meanings – in other words, they are polysemous. Experimental research has suggested that polysemy presents both benefits and challenges to word processing and learning for adults, depending, for instance, on how semantically similar the two meanings of a word are. However, relatively little research has examined children’s knowledge of homonyms, factors that affect this knowledge, or how we might support this learning educationally.
In this talk, I will discuss our cross-sectional research which examines factors affecting primary school children’s knowledge of English homonyms, including individual differences (e.g., having English as a first or additional language), and psycholinguistic factors (e.g., frequency of words and word meanings). I will also introduce a randomised controlled trial we are conducting, which examines the effect of two different versions of a digital vocabulary game that we have developed with a game developer on children’s knowledge of homonyms, with some preliminary findings.
