Research
Shifting vowels
Dr David Britain, from the Department of Language and
Linguistics, has been awarded AHRC research leave to complete the writing
up of his research examining vowel changes in Southern British and the
Southern Hemisphere Englishes of New Zealand, Australia and the Falkland
Islands.
This research project began in 1998, when Dr Britain was a Visiting Fellow at
Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, and organised an
international workshop on the relationships between British and Southern
Hemisphere Englishes. He and a number of others at the workshop were
unhappy with accounts, largely based on studies of American English, of
the histories of some ongoing vowel changes. Sociolinguistic and
demographic research carried out during that stay in New Zealand, as well
as during a period as a Research Fellow at the University of Sydney in
2000, persuaded him that it would be fruitful to pursue alternative
accounts for these linguistic changes.
Dr Britain has since examined linguistic data from a number of historical and
contemporary sources in Southern England, as well as from Australia, New
Zealand and the Falklands. This leave will give him the opportunity to
write three articles which will complete this project.
Babies prefer faces and voices
Two projects at the Infant Cognition Lab, by third year
undergraduates, have produced interesting results that shed light on the
origin and development of human thinking.
The first, by Shireen Quraishi, looked at six to eight-month-olds’
ability to match what they see with what they feel or hear.
By placing the babies in front of two screens showing images of faces
and objects, whilst also playing audio clips of voices and beeps, Shireen
found that babies turned to the screen which had the same number of items
as number of sounds heard, and, most importantly, preferred to look longer
at the face, than the object.
The second project, by Madelyn Wright, asked whether infants under six
months are better able to represent and store images of faces or simple
shapes. Babies were presented with an image of a face and of a shape, then
shown alternative stimuli which varied the original feature. The results
show that, at six months, babies attend more to faces than objects,
suggesting they are more attuned to the social world than the physical.
If you would like your baby to participate in research, please contact
the Lab on telephone 01206 874149, e-mail
iclab@essex.ac.uk or register at
www.essex.ac.uk/psychology/ICL/register.html.
Mood changing exercise
Short periods of exercise provoke a substantial mood
change that it can take over an hour to recover from, according to
research by Dr Dominic Micklewright and Professor Ralph Beneke from
Biological Sciences.
Their study - the findings of which were presented at the British
Psychological Society’s annual conference at the University of York last
month - aimed to discover how moods (such as tension, depression or anger)
respond to a bout of intense exercise. Participants performed a maximum
effort cycling task for 30 seconds, followed by a one hour of seated rest.
Their results show that this short period of exhaustive exercise leads to
a change in mood which it took approximately one and a quarter hours to
recover from. This pattern of mood change, during exercise recovery, also
appeared to be consistent enough to describe using a mathematical model.
Dr Micklewright explained: ‘These findings have a relevance to everyday
occurrences, such as sprinting to catch a bus or running up a flight of
stairs, in addition to more obvious implications for sports performers.
The results have implications for athletes who are expected to compete in
repeated bouts of physical activity with only short periods of rest in
between.’
Further research will be carried out to refine the mathematical model
and evaluate whether these findings apply to other forms of exercise.
Also in the printed April edition of Wyvern:
- Bookshelf
- New Chimera study
- ISER publishes report on employment disadvantages
