Question: What is the latest project you've done??

Jenni Rodd answered on 13 Jun 2016:

Hello!
My most recent project has been looking at how quickly people can learn new meanings for words. For example the first time I saw the word “tweet” as meaning a post on twitter, not the sound of a bird!

We got an author to make up some stories for us that included new word meanings. For example there is a spy story which has a secret hiding device called a “foam”. We found that if we make the stories interesting enough then MOST people are REALLY good at this. They can learn these new meanings even when they only see the word twice in the story. And it doesn’t matter whether we tell them to learn the meanings or not. And they still know these meanings after 7 days. We were really surprised how good people are at learning new meanings.

The next stage is to figure out why some people are better than others so we can help people get better at learning new meanings. You’ll need to do this when you learn new subjects in school.