Computational Linguistics Colloquium

Thursday, 24 April (postponed), 16:15
Conference Room, Building C7 4

Establishing reference in language comprehension: A neurocognitive perspective

Jos J. A. van Berkum
Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, Nijmegen

The neurocognition of language comprehension has long been dominated by research on syntactic and semantic integration. However, to understand expressions like "he did it" or "the little girl", combining word meanings in accordance with semantic and syntactic constraints is not enough - readers and listeners also need to work out what or who is being referred to. In my talk, I will review a series of neurocognitive experiments (mainly using EEG, i.e., brain potentials) on reference resolution in sentences and short texts. Amongst other things, the EEG findings tell us that readers and listeners can determine the set of contextually suitable referents extremely rapidly after noun or pronoun onset, and that referential concerns immediately guide and sometimes even overrule syntactic analysis (i.e., go against a "syntactocentric" view of processing). Furthermore, the EEG and fMRI evidence reveals that the brain responds to problems with reference and problems with word meaning in qualitatively different ways, which seems to go against a simple Gricean perspective in which violations of different conversational maxims trigger comparable inferential activity. I will discuss the implications of these and other findings for theories of language comprehension. Along the way, it will become clear that the mapping between neurocognitive findings and psycholinguistic theories, although not a hopeless affair, is not as simple as one might have hoped for.

If you would like to meet with the speaker, please contact Berry Claus.