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What?
Did You Say?
Marcus
Taft
Edited by Ben Callegari
Have
you ever thought about the way we speak? How it is that we
develop language skills? Professor Marcus Taft has spent most
of his career unravelling the complex nature of language and
cognition.
My name is Professor Marcus Taft. I am a researcher and lecturer
at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Australia. As
a professor, I have been researching for a number of years
in the area of language and cognition.
“I was interested
in language at high school, particularly the structure of
words in different languages”
On April 12, I gave a lecture in my 3rd Year Psychology of
Language course followed by a two hour tutorial for that course.
The lecture focused on my own research
which looks at the way in which good and poor readers might
differ in the strategies they adopt when decoding the words
that they are reading. In the tutorial, I introduced a number
of possible ideas for a project that the students are to conduct
over the coming weeks in groups of two or three.
The two central aspects of my job are research and teaching.
Today, I was able to combine the two. The lecture allowed
me to present my research findings within the context of a
general course on human language performance, while the projects
introduced in the tutorial expose students to the potential
excitement of undertaking research in my area of interest.
I was interested in language at high school, particularly
the structure of words in different languages. So, I was more
focused on the structure of language than on being able to
speak a second language (which is why I liked Latin and classical
Greek).
I never did science subjects at high school and felt like
I had a bit of an identity crisis when I had to enrol in the
Science Faculty at university in order to major in Psychology.
However, I soon discovered that I appreciated the objective
rigour of the scientific approach and am glad that there is
the opportunity in Psychology to adopt such an approach in
exploring my interests in linguistic
structure.
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