Guest speaker: Lyn Tieu (Western Sydney University)

We are very pleased to (digitally) welcome back alumna Lyn Tieu (BA 2007, MA 2008, now at Western Sydney University). Following our MA program, she earned her Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut in 2013, focusing on syntax and semantics from an acquisitional and psycholinguistic perspective, and then completed two postdoctoral fellowships. She is now a Senior Research Fellow at Western Sydney University and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Linguistics at Macquarie University. Her talk, "Psycholinguistic investigations of linguistic inferences," will be held online via Zoom meeting on Friday, May 15, from 9:30 AM to 11:00 AM. Please see the email for registration and room details.

Language conveys meaningful information through different kinds of 'inferences', a number of which have been investigated in contemporary linguistics. For example, the sentence "Mary liked some of your ideas" asserts a positive sentiment from Mary, but it can also convey the negative meaning that she didn't like all of your ideas. The ability to decipher the complexities of linguistic meaning and navigate the different inferences that abound in everyday conversation is integral to linguistic communication, and we typically deploy this ability without a moment's thought. But what exactly is the nature of this ability and where does it come from? Much of my research investigates the nature of linguistic inferences - how they are represented in the grammar, how children acquire them, and what their cognitive origins might be. In this talk, I’ll focus on two findings from recent work. First, children acquire some kinds of linguistic inferences before others, shedding light on the grammar behind linguistic inferences. Second, people can spontaneously draw linguistic inferences even from non-linguistic objects, such as gestures, sound effects, and emoji, suggesting a more general cognitive source for linguistic inferences than previously thought. Both of these findings exemplify how the cognitive architecture that underlies meaning can readily and reliably be investigated using modern psycholinguistic techniques in conjunction with formal linguistic theories.