Doctoral Dissertation Research: Processing the Dynamicity of Events in Language

University Of Southern California, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

The world is a dynamically changing place, filled with different kinds of events ('things that happen') such as peeling a potato, running, wiping a table, throwing a ball, dancing, etc. Humans' perception and conceptualization of events is central for theories of language and mind. This project investigates the following questions: When a comprehender encounters linguistic input describing an event, what information guides how a mental representation of that event is constructed? How is information from various linguistic and non-linguistic sources integrated to create an understanding of an event? This project ultimately aims to shed light on the cognitive processes that enable comprehenders to rapidly update their understanding of linguistic descriptions of dynamically changing events. The anticipated findings of this project will advance scientific understanding of the mechanisms that enable humans to rapidly understand language in real time. These findings have the potential to generate new insights into the cognitive mechanisms of predictive language processing, which can potentially provide basic scientific knowledge beneficial for applications such as predictive text generation, machine translation, and language learning and teaching. This project aims to foster undergraduate research at various levels, allowing students to acquire cutting-edge skills and expertise in psycholinguistic research. The project uses behavioral methods to investigate how grammatical and non-grammatical sources of information guide comprehenders' expectations and mental representations of dynamically changing events. Three different sources of information will be investigated: (i) grammatical information, (ii) discourse-level information, and (iii) information about real-world events. The investigators combine insights from formal/lexical semantics, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive psychology about event representations to advance our understanding of the relationship between the human mind and language. The results of this project have the potential to significantly further understanding and knowledge of how language users comprehend the dynamically changing events described in linguistic input, in an incremental and anticipatory manner. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.