Talks are online or hybrid.
☕ Refreshments are provided for in-person sessions.
Detailed abstracts will be advertised two weeks prior to the seminars.

15:00 – 16:00 1st February 2024

⭐Affect in Mind
🎓Dr. Tim Wharton, University of Brighton

📍Location: Lecture Theatre 4, King George VI Building, Newcastle University
🖥️Zoom Meeting ID: 687 395 3555

📃Abstract:
When David Hume wrote ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions’ he famously articulated a view of the relationship between rationality or reasoning on the one hand and emotions or ‘passions’ on the other. According to Hume, cognition and affect, thinking and feeling, reason and passion – often analysed as two opposing forces – work together in complex ways. His view foreshadowed the work of Kahneman and Tversky (1974) on cognitive biases, according to which decision-making involves hot-headed emotional choices as much as cool, logical ones.

Given that (a) modern theories of pragmatics assume that human communication is ‘inferential’ – i.e. rooted in reasoning and rationality and (b) the communication of information about emotional states is ubiquitous among humans, one could be forgiven for assuming that pragmatic accounts of linguistic communication would include quite well-developed views of the roles played in both by affect and emotion. However, for a range of reasons, scholars have tended to persist with the view that the mental processes behind reason and passions exist in separate domains. Consequently, the emotional dimension to linguistic communication has tended to play only a background role. Indeed, in most accounts it plays no role at all.

In this talk I present some of the reasons why affect has been side-lined in this way and assess the main challenges to accommodating affect and emotion within a theory of pragmatics. I also provide an overview of ongoing collaborative work with the Swiss Centre for Affective Science (CISA) that builds on previous work (see Wharton et al. 2021, Wharton and de Saussure 2023) and explores the idea of a methodological merger between the pragmatic framework of Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995), and the affective science framework, Appraisal Theory (Ellsworth 2013, Scherer and Moors 2019). The merger attempts a ‘bottom-up’ reworking of the pragmatics of affect, which begins from fundamental assumptions rather than the more ‘top-down’ approach adopted by many, which adds bolted-on extras. Such an approach embeds advances in pragmatics within the development of recent approaches to emotion as cognitive appraisals and demonstrates the importance of keeping affect in mind.

Kahneman, D. & A. Tversky (1974) Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases Science, Vol. 185, No. 4157: 1124-1131.

Ellsworth, P. (2013) Appraisal theory: old and new questions. Emotion Review: 125-131.

Scherer, K. & A. Moors (2019) The emotion process: Event appraisal and component differentiation. Annual Review of Psychology, 70: 719-745.

Vergis, N. (2023) How affect modulates conversational meanings. Cognition and Emotion. DOI: 10.1080/02699931.2023.2270197

Wharton, T., C. Bonard, D. Dukes, D. Sander & S. Oswald (2021) Relevance and emotion. In Journal of Pragmatics, 181: 259-269.

Wharton, T. & L. de Saussure (2023) Pragmatics and Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press


15:00 – 16:00 29th February 2024

⭐Measuring Engagement in Advanced Dementia (MEAD): Extending Adaptive Interaction
🎓Prof. Arlene Astell, Northumbria University

📍Location: Lecture Theatre 4, King George VI Building, Newcastle University
🖥️Zoom Meeting ID: 687 395 3555

📃Abstract:
Individuals living with dementia who lose the ability to speak, are at increased risk of isolation from the social world as caregivers struggle to communicate with them. Adaptive Interaction (AI) uses nonverbal channels to connect with people living with dementia who can no longer speak. Care staff and family members can use AI to interact and build caregiving relationships with people who cannot speak using the ‘fundamentals of communication”. Building on this evidence base, the MEAD project is developing a new measure to support ongoing opportunities for meaningful engagement, authentic caring relationships and creating and maintaining a supportive community for individuals who can no longer speak. This presentation will introduce AI and the work being undertaken in the MEAD project.


15:00 – 16:00 25th April 2024

⭐Moving on after Head and Neck Cancer: Survivorship Experiences and Post-Traumatic Growth
🎓Dr. Fiona Menger, Newcastle University

📍Location: Lecture Theatre 4, King George VI Building, Newcastle University
🖥️Zoom Meeting ID: 687 395 3555

📃Abstract:
Head and neck cancer (HNC) may be particularly traumatic due to impact on physical function, appearance, and mental well-being. Post-traumatic growth (PTG) refers to positive psychological changes after trauma and is linked to better health-related quality of life after cancer. The Life after Head and Neck Cancer Study investigated HNC experiences in 20 survivors, aiming to understand more about development of PTG and inform supportive interventions. Qualitative analysis revealed possible pathways toward PTG and experiences in common for those who struggled to identify any positive changes. Fiona’s seminar will present findings on PTG, rumination, self-disclosure, and the HNC survivor environment, discussing clinical implications and possible next steps.


16:00 – 17:00 1st May 2024

⭐Assessing language in bilingual children growing up in Sweden: How can we disentangle typical development and language impairment?
🎓Prof. Ute Bohnacker, Uppsala University

📍Location: Room 1.36c, King George VI Building, Newcastle University
🖥️Zoom Meeting ID: 687 395 3555

📃Abstract:
As in many other countries, there has been a lack of baseline data concerning the linguistic development of bilingual children in Sweden, making it difficult to reliably identify developmental language disorder (DLD) in bilinguals. I will be reporting on an ongoing research project at Uppsala University that involves 223 bilingual preschool and primary-school children from mixed socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds whose home language is Arabic or Turkish and who are schooled in the majority language Swedish (Swedish Research Council 2014-2019, Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation 2020-2025). Arabic and Turkish are two of the largest immigrant languages in Sweden. The children were tested in both their languages on a range of experimental language tasks from the LITMUS battery, developed specifically for the assessment of bilingual children (COST Action IS0804, https://www.bi-sli.org). We included measures of phonological processing (quasi-universal, cross-linguistic and language-specific nonword repetition tasks), receptive and expressive vocabulary, story comprehension (inferential comprehension of macrostructure) and story production (Multilingual Assessment of Narratives, MAIN, Gagarina et al. 2019). These tasks are complemented by collecting extensive information via parental questionnaires and interviews, and for a subsample, also via home observations (in Turkish/Arabic), school observations, teacher interviews, SLP interviews and longitudinal follow-ups. 17 of the children had a diagnosis of DLD. So far, we have investigated the cross-sectional data (4;0‒8;1) in relation to age, language exposure, SES, and – for NWR and narratives – in relation to vocabulary, and we are currently analysing the longitudinal data (from age 4‒5 to age 9‒10). The DLD children are being investigated more in depth on an individual basis, to see whether and how their performance on the LITMUS language tasks stands out in perspicuous ways from that of the ‘typically developing’ (TD) children, either in the majority language Swedish and/or in the home language Arabic/Turkish. I will be reporting on some of these findings. I will also discuss whether background factors, particularly information on language exposure, can help us interpret the language scores when TD and DLD performances overlap, and what might be considered a warning sign for DLD in bilingual children age 4‒8.