Week of March 27

Harvard LangCog

 

Jesse Snedeker (Harvard)   Title:  Top-down prediction in language comprehension: a handful of facts and a mystery   Abstract: Over the last thirty years, psycholinguists have converged on a model of language comprehension in which perceptual input (e.g., sounds) incrementally activates higher level representations (e.g., possible messages) resulting in predictions of upcoming information at the lower levels (e.g., words or even sounds). I’ll report on some studies that probe the development, universality and limits of this system by looking at prediction in naturalistic tasks with adults and children. I’ll introduce a new method of collecting EEG data. Along the way I’ll try to integrate these studies with our earlier work using the visual world paradigm.  We will discover a gulf between the two sets of findings and spend some time exploring how we might bridge this gap.   Tuesday March 28 | 5:30-7:00 PM | William James Hall #1550