Center Calendar
“Events in Language and Mind” – Dr. Anna Papafragou, Professor, University of Pennsylvania
Tuesday, September 24, 2024, 02:00pm - 03:30pm
152 Frelinghuysen Rd, Psych Bldg, Busch Campus, Room 105
Abstract: Humans are surprisingly adept at interpreting what is happening around them, even from a single glance. Beginning at infancy, we are able to recognize dynamic events, the roles that various entities play in these events and the temporal and causal components that make up events. Furthermore, we use language to describe the events that we experience. Despite the central role of events in the mind, the study of events within cognitive science has until recently remained fragmented. In this talk, I combine psycholinguistic, developmental and cross-linguistic approaches to address a series of key questions about the nature of events: What do we represent when we represent an event? How do such representations make contact with language in both novice (child) and experienced (adult) communicators? Does cross-linguistic variation in how events are encoded affect the way we think about events in the world? Our findings show that abstract properties of event structure underlie both the conceptual and the linguistic encoding of event structure. Furthermore, the way learners acquire event language supports the presence of deep homologies between linguistic and non-linguistic event architecture. Finally, children and adults from different linguistic communities often represent and remember events in similar ways, despite cross-linguistic variation in how events are encoded. Together, these results highlight novel connections between abstract event structure in language and cognition and bear on broad theories about how thought is related to language.
Bio: Dr. Anna Papafragou
Dr. Anna Papafragou is Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently the Director of the interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Language and Communication Sciences and a member of the Psychology Graduate Group at Penn. Her research investigates how children acquire meanings in language, how language is used and understood, and how language interfaces with human perception and cognition.
