[Koglist] [CEU Cogsci Talks] REMINDER: Invitation to the Doctoral Defense of Elena Marx at the Department of Cognitive Science, Vienna, January 13, 3 pm CET

The Department of Cognitive Science cordially invites you to the public defense of the PhD thesis INFERRING TEMPORAL ORDER IN LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION by Elena Marx Tuesday, January 13, 3 P.M. CET QS Auditorium (CEU, Quellenstrasse 51, 1100 Vienna) Zoom: https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/97449457820?pwd=MKOSvQ2ATdtpwzVVSZSWDj0Iwab4ka.1&… Meeting ID: 974 4945 7820 Passcode: 835739 PRIMARY SUPERVISOR: Éva Wittenberg (CEU) SECONDARY SUPERVISOR: Ágnes Melinda Kovács (CEU) Members of the Dissertation Committee: Gergely Csibra, Chair, CEU Gerry Altmann<https://psychology.uconn.edu/person/gerry-altmann/>n/>, University of Connecticut as External Examiner Ercenur Ünal<https://www.mpi.nl/people/unal-ercenur>, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics as External Examiner *Anyone not affiliated with CEU wishing to attend in-person in Vienna must RSVP here<https://forms.office.com/e/QLUr0KiZPL> to get access to the lecture hall. ABSTRACT |How do people order events in their mind when listening to a story? Language often provides explicit hints as to whether something has happened, will happen or happened before or after something else. However, in many cases, the temporal order between linguistically described situations is underspecified and needs to be inferred. This thesis proposes that such inferences are grounded in more general cognitive principles that take event dynamicity - namely, whether situations are inherently static or change over time - as a starting point. Specifically, I propose that comprehenders infer more salient events to happen against the backdrop of less salient states. Four lines of experiments serve to test this proposal experimentally. The first study provides first empirical evidence that temporal interpretation is systematically driven by encoded event dynamicity. Participants reliably matched complex situation descriptions to visual sequences in which described states preceded described events. The second study replicates this pattern of results in three languages in an act-out task, demonstrating that this interpretative preference arises in the absence of visual scaffolding. The third study extends the linguistic context under investigation from complex sentence descriptions to discourse. The fourth study delves deeper into the underlying mechanisms of this temporal inference by using different tenses, thereby testing competing explanations based on linguistic encoding and more general cognitive principles. Overall, this thesis sheds light on the broader question of how event cognition and language interact to form mental representations of temporal relations. Its findings support models of event comprehension that treat event structure, more specifically the presence or absence of dynamic change, as a central organizing principle for understanding temporal structure in language. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hosted by the Department of Cognitive Science [cid:image001.png@01DC83B7.EB855570] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ GyörgyNÉ Finta (Réka) Department Coordinator Department of cognitive SCience --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [cid:image002.jpg@01DC83B7.EB855570] 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