Time and causality in language comprehension

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• Dr Silvia Gennari, University of York, Department of Psychology
• Tuesday 02 March 2010, 16:00-17:30
• GR-06/07, English Faculty Building.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Chris Cummins.

A prevalent issue in language processing is how we map words and sentences onto representations of events. Although the processing of some aspects of events is fairly well understood, relatively little is known about how we process and represent an event’s time course and its temporal relation to other events. In this talk, I present a series of experiments investigating the processing of durative and non-durative events and the types of knowledge underlying their representations. It is argued that (a) the duration of events is computed as soon as sufficient information has accrued in the unfolding sentence; and (b) event duration representations are grounded in knowledge of causal relations between events in the world. Thus, causality provides the basis for temporal understanding in language comprehension.

This talk is part of the RCEAL Tuesday Colloquia series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• GR-06/07, English Faculty Building
• RCEAL Tuesday Colloquia

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