News & Events

Eventful processing: Constructing event representations from language

Marten van Schijndel

Humanities Center Room D

Events are central to several theories of cognition and communication. How do comprehenders decode events from strings and build event representations in their minds? Altmann and Ekves (2019) suggest that comprehenders only build representations of event participants rather than events themselves, while Dowty (1991) claims that features of event participants are inferred from verbs, suggesting that cognitive representations focus on events rather than participants (see also Radvansky and Zacks, 2017). In this talk, I will present recent experimental and computational work investigating which event features are represented by humans during language processing and the cue locations of these features in sentences.

This event will take place in person and via zoom. If participating online, please register in advance:

https://rochester.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcsd-iuqD8tG9SEvQTZ9m9LcikHj4bJCYHE