A paper I co-authored with Professor Louise Connell as just been published in the journal Behavior Research Methods. I previously mentioned the preprint, and you can read more about the content of the paper on that post.
Together with my colleague and lab PI, Louise Connell, I have developed a new measure of semantic distance between concepts. It is based on the senses and body parts involved in experiencing those concepts — in other words it is fully grounded in sensorimotor experience. This sets it aside from other measures of semantic distance, such as those based on distributions of words in language, on encyclopaedic databases, or on lists of properties or features. It also is fairly comprehensive (thanks to the expansive norms collected by colleagues), with distances available for nearly 800,000,000 pairs of concepts.
The measure is described in a new preprint, and you can search, visualise and play around with the distances (e.g. the above image) using an online app I also developed.
My colleagues Briony Banks, Louise Connell and I recently submitted a paper reporting research we've been doing at Lancaster University over the last year.
Needless to say, the Covid-19 lockdowns in the UK have been a substantial impediment to this work, so it's really good to see it finally complete.
I've just started a new job at Lancaster University, working as a postdoc in Louise Connell's lab. I'll be looking at the roles of linguistic representations and sensory simulations in human cognition. You can read more about the lab's research aims on its website.
Update: Louise has now moved to Maynooth University, and the old lab's page at Lancaster has ceased to exist. But you can easily find out the kind of things Louise's colleagues worked on at her new page.