Please note that today's meeting of the Fieldwork Group is cancelled.
10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Cognitive Science of Language Group
Guest speaker: Ken McRae (University of Western Ontario): "Event knowledge and semantic processing."
People constantly use concepts and word meaning to recognize entities and objects in their environment, to anticipate how entities will behave and interact with one another, to know how objects should be used, and to understand language. Over the years, there have been a number of theories regarding how concepts are organized and structured in semantic memory. For example, various theories stress that concepts (or lexical items) are linked by undifferentiated associations. Other theories stress hierarchical categorical (taxonomic) structure, whereas others focus on conceptual similarity spaces. In this talk, I will present evidence that people’s knowledge of real-world events and situations is an important factor underlying the structure and (contextually-determined) usage of concepts in semantic memory. I will present experiments spanning word, picture, and sentence processing. Evidence for the importance of event-based knowledge will cover a number of types of concepts, including verbs, nouns denoting living and nonliving things, and abstract concepts. I conclude that semantic memory is structured in the mind so that the computation and use of knowledge of real-world events and situations is both rapid and fundamental. In other words, event knowledge is an important force that shapes the dynamics of real-time, context-sensitive, semantic computations.
11:30 AM - 1:00 PM: Phonetics/Phonology Research Group
Marisa Brook (faculty) and Mirva Johnson (University of Wisconsin, Madison) on vowel trajectories over time through Finnish-to-English vowel shift in Sointula, British Columbia.
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