Workshop on Events in Language and Cognition 2016

Boston College, Chestnut Hill MA

Investigators

Abstract

Language and communication are fundamental to being human. Alone of all animals, humans can tell one another their thoughts and pass along proposals, instructions, warnings, and other ideas. Despite great scientific and technological advances in understanding formal properties of language such as grammar, relatively little is known about how language conveys thought. One major reason is that in order to explain how language conveys thought, we need to understand the structure of thought itself. The structure of thought is not well understood, particularly when it comes to thoughts about events (building a house, eating dinner, etc.). As a result, our understanding of how language conveys events is particularly poor. Without this missing piece, our understanding of human nature is incomplete and our language technology is limited. One difficulty in accounting for how humans use language to describe and discuss events is that--in addition to the fact that events are highly abstract and thus difficult to study--work on event representations is scattered across different scientific fields with different theoretical underpinnings, methods, and terminologies. This workshop has been organized to bridge these differences by bringing together leading researchers to share recent advances, assess the state of the research, build ties between research fields, and plot a way forward. The one-day workshop will consist of two invited presentations, seven juried talks, a poster session with approximately 20 posters, and a closing discussion. The poster session will help ensure ample opportunity for student presentations and involvement. In keeping with the interdisciplinary focus of the meeting, one invited speaker is a linguist and the other is a psychologist who specializes in language acquisition, and the closing discussion will be led by two researchers who study events from a non-linguistic perspective. Juried talks and posters will be chosen with an eye towards diversity in seniority, demographics, research tradition, and phenomenon of interest. The workshop is co-located with the premier American psycholinguistics conference (the CUNY Human Sentence Processing conference), since many attendees at that conference have research expertise relating to both language and thought.