[Koglist] [CEU Cogsci Talks] REMINDER: Invitation to the Doctoral Defense of Levente Madarász at the Department of Cognitive Science, Vienna, February 16, 3 pm CET

The Department of Cognitive Science cordially invites you to the public defense of the PhD thesis Developing an Understanding of Gradable Complementaries by Levente Madarász Monday, February 16, 3 P.M. CET Room C323 (CEU, Quellenstrasse 51, 1100 Vienna) Zoom: https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/97977961120?pwd=hB46T8WUzoyVgytP2Nz0EC2iNWGM8O.1&… Meeting ID: 979 7796 1120 Passcode: 432875 PRIMARY SUPERVISOR: Ernő Téglás (CEU) SECONDARY SUPERVISOR: Dan Sperber (CEU) Members of the Dissertation Committee: Christophe Heintz Chair, CEU Krysten Syrett<https://sites.rutgers.edu/kristen-syrett/about/>t/>, Professor, Department of Linguistics and the Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS), at Rutgers University as External Examiner Nausicaa Pouscoulous<https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/4982-nausicaa-pouscoulous>, Associate Professor, University College London as External Examiner *Anyone not affiliated with CEU wishing to attend in-person in Vienna must RSVP here<https://forms.office.com/e/b4FJpJKHGx> to get access to the lecture hall. ABSTRACT |Research in the area of semantics highlighted that certain gradable adjective pairs might relate to each other in a complementary fashion (e.g., clean:dirty, dry:wet, smooth:rough, etc., Cruse 1980; Rotstein and Winter 2004; Kennedy and McNally 2005, a.o.). The results of empirical works have suggested that not only adults, but younger children too are sensitive to the distinction between such gradable complementaries and adjectives falling into different typological groups (Frazier, Clifton Jr, and Stolterfoht 2008; Syrett, Kennedy, and Lidz 2010; Syrett and Lidz 2010, a.o.). This dissertation contributes to these findings by addressing different developmental aspects of these expressions. Utilizing a novel choice task, Study 1 aimed to illuminate how children judge gradable complementaries when those modify plural entities. Relying on both corpus data and a parental survey, Study 2 explores how gradable complementary terms appear in the productive vocabulary of children acquiring Hungarian, and follows up on the findings with an experimental investigation. Lastly, with an other novel choice task, Study 3 aims to establish if upon identifying the meaning of a previously unheard adjective children benefit from an information that it is not applicable to some degrees of a gradable complementary attribute. The observations made in these studies are indicative in the following respects: Study 1 showed that the way 4-year-old children judged the applicability of the attributes clean and dirty applied to a set of items differed from how 5-year-olds approached the same problem. Study 2 indicated that when considering gradable complementary pairs, children acquiring Hungarian have a tendency to verbalize the partial members of these terms prior to their total counterparts. While Study 3 indicated that older (but not younger) 4-year-old children might be more likely to benefit from cues pertaining to the inapplicability of an item with an interim degree of a minimal-standard attribute in identifying the meaning of a previously unheard adjective. Considered together, the observations made in these studies add to previous results in that they show how aspects of the use, production and identification of such descriptions develop, often into the late preschool years. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hosted by the Department of Cognitive Science [cid:image001.png@01DC9A7A.94AD5F70] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ GyörgyNÉ Finta (Réka) Department Coordinator Department of cognitive SCience --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [cid:image002.jpg@01DC9A7A.94AD5F70] CEU GmbH - CEU Central European University private university Quellenstrasse 51, A-1100 Wien, Room B502 Office: +43 125230 5138 cognitivescience.ceu.edu<https://cognitivescience.ceu.edu/>| www.ceu.edu<http://www.ceu.edu/> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- CEU is committed to energy and environmental sustainability www.ceu.hu/sustainability<http://www.ceu.hu/sustainability> [https://ci3.googleusercontent.com/mail-sig/AIorK4wJmntYV9xI46HE4vvhea1QVsjj…] Please, consider your environmental responsibility. Before printing this e-mail message, ask yourself whether you really need a hard copy. ______________________________________________ Subscribe by sending an empty mail to talks-subscribe(a)cogsci.ceu.edu Unsubscribe by sending an empty mail to talks-unsubscribe(a)cogsci.ceu.edu