Colloquium 060: Yao-ying Lai (Waseda University & National Rehabilitation Center for Persons with Disabilities)
NTHU Linguistics Fall, 2018 Colloquium series 060 present:
Speaker: Yao-Ying Lai (Ph.D. in Linguistics, Yale University)
Postdoctoral fellow at Waseda University & National Rehabilitation Center for Persons with Disabilities, Japan
Topic: Neurocognitive mechanisms of processing underspecified meaning
Time: Sep 17, 2018, 12:30pm
Venue: B305, HSS Building, National Tsing Hua University
Abstract
In this talk, I will discuss how comprehenders obtain underspecified sentence meaning during real-time processing via two cases—complement coercion and aspectual coercion. Both cases involve a piece of meaning that is morpho-syntactically absent yet understood by comprehenders. Processing such “enriched” semantic compositions engenders additional cost and specific brain activity. I will show results from a series of experiments (self-paced reading, questionnaire, eye-tracking, and fMRI), which implicate the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying semantic processing. In general, the findings are consistent with a lexically-driven, contextually-constraining system for processing underspecified sentence meaning.
Speaker: Yao-Ying Lai (Ph.D. in Linguistics, Yale University)
Postdoctoral fellow at Waseda University & National Rehabilitation Center for Persons with Disabilities, Japan
Topic: Neurocognitive mechanisms of processing underspecified meaning
Time: Sep 17, 2018, 12:30pm
Venue: B305, HSS Building, National Tsing Hua University
Abstract
In this talk, I will discuss how comprehenders obtain underspecified sentence meaning during real-time processing via two cases—complement coercion and aspectual coercion. Both cases involve a piece of meaning that is morpho-syntactically absent yet understood by comprehenders. Processing such “enriched” semantic compositions engenders additional cost and specific brain activity. I will show results from a series of experiments (self-paced reading, questionnaire, eye-tracking, and fMRI), which implicate the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying semantic processing. In general, the findings are consistent with a lexically-driven, contextually-constraining system for processing underspecified sentence meaning.