Week of December 10, 2012

Examination Period Begins Thursday

The Fall Examination Period begins this Thursday, December 13 (the Reading Period ends on Wednesday, December 12), and lasts through Friday, December 21. The department will be closed (and Boylston Hall will not be heated) from December 22 through January 2.

GSAS Workshop on Indo-European and Historical Linguistics

Georges-Jean Pinault (École pratique des hautes études)
Thoughts about the PIE suffix of the "middle" participle
Thursday, December 13 | 4pm | Boylston 303

Language and Cognition Meeting

Colin Phillips (University of Maryland)
Generating expectations and meanings: Electrophysiology and language architecture
Tuesday, December 11 | 5-6:30pm | William James Hall 105 (the lecture hall on the 1st floor)
If you plan to attend, but are not a regular, please RSVP to Hugh Rabagliati.
Abstract: 

• In this talk I will discuss recent lines of research in the cognitive neuroscience of language processing that started from independent puzzles, but that appear to be converging on a common solution. The first puzzle involves apparent discrepancies in the localization results obtained using fMRI and MEG measures of 'semantic' processing. The same tasks and materials yield conflicting localizations when measured using different tools. The second puzzle involves a recent series of studies that undermine received wisdom about the functional status of ERP components and, moreinterestingly, challenge the widespread view in linguistics and psycholinguistics that semantic composition is tightly coupled to the syntax of a sentence. The solution to both puzzles involves recognizing that the N400, a neural response component traditionally associated with compositional semantic interpretation, is more closely linked to lexical processes and to word-level expectations. This also provides an account of the split personality of the N400 - it is sometimes very 'smart', responding to fine details of the compositional semantic interpretation and pragmatic congruity of linguistic input, but at times it is surprisingly 'dumb', sensitive only to the lexical properties of a word and to associative relations among words. I show how it is possible to turn the dumb N400 into the smart N400, and that this reflects comprehenders' ability to use different types of information to drive their expectations on different time scales. Rather than undermining widespread assumptions about language architecture, the electrophysiological evidence instead provides finer-grained evidence on how interpretations are computed on-line. The evidence is drawn from studies in English, Spanish, and Chinese.