Week of Feb 2

Welcome!

Claire Rong, a Ph.D. student at l'École Normale Supérieure, Paris, is joining us this semester as a Fellow.  Welcome to the Department of Linguistics at Harvard! 

LangCog

The first LangCog meeting of the semester will be Tuesday, February 3rd, from 5:30-7:00pm, in William James Hall, Room 1550. The speaker is Jingyi Wu, and the title and abstract of the talk can be found below. You can find the schedule for the remainder of the semester on the LangCog website. Food will be provided, as always!

Title: Is Language a Window to Human Mind? Evidence from Linguistic and Visual Categorization

Abstract: Do linguistic structures reflect the organization of human conceptual representations? While language allows speakers to describe the same event in multiple ways, prior work shows that verb meanings and argument realization are systematically constrained, raising the possibility that linguistic form mirrors underlying event cognition. Here, we investigate whether event categories are consistently represented across linguistic and visual modalities. Across two experiments, participants were asked to categorize event types using either linguistic descriptions or short video clips depicting the same classes of events. We find that humans reliably and consistently categorize events in both modalities, exhibiting parallel patterns of categorization across language and vision. By contrast, state-of-the-art computational vision models fail to reliably recover these event categories from the same visual inputs. These results suggest that linguistic and visual event processing draw on a shared underlying system of event representation, providing converging evidence that language offers a window into the structure of human event cognition.