Event Structure in Language and Cognition

University Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

Humans are surprisingly adept at interpreting what is happening around them. We are able to recognize dynamic events, the roles that various entities play in these events and the causal and other relations that contribute to events. Furthermore, we use language to describe our dynamic experiences in ways that reflect our underlying event understanding. Despite the central role of events in human cognition and language, the study of events within the cognitive sciences has until recently remained fragmented. This research introduces novel theoretical and empirical tools to address key questions about the nature of events: How do we represent events in thought? How do novice (child) and experienced (adult) communicators use language to encode event representations? Do speakers of different languages think about events in the world differently? The proposed research presents a new and integrated approach to one of the most fundamental topics in the study of the mind, namely the connection between cognition and language. Because of its deeply interdisciplinary nature, this project offers unique training opportunities in the cognitive sciences at the postdoctoral, graduate, and undergraduate level. Moreover, the project exposes trainees to the excitement of international collaborations and fosters new academic partnerships. The project includes outreach and mentorship activities for interested members of the community who may not otherwise be exposed to academic research. A unique feature of the proposed research is that it brings together two influential but separate lines of research on the structure of events, one studying perceptual and cognitive mechanisms of event representation, and the other focusing on the semantics of events in linguistics. Building on these two major approaches, this research proposes that the internal temporal structure of an event is an architectural feature of event cognition. A planned series of experiments aims to show that temporal event structure is computed rapidly and spontaneously during event perception, affects further cognitive processes such as event memory, and organizes event representations in both adults and children, and across people who speak different languages. This innovative combination of methods and theories allows us to explore previously hidden links between event cognition and event language and has the potential to reveal the precise format of event representations and their mapping to language that have so far remained elusive. 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.