Lecture | LUCL Colloquium series
Events in language and cognition
- Monique Flecken (UVA)
- Date
- Friday 24 February 2023
- Time
- Explanation
- The LUCL Colloquium will conclude with drinks in the LUCL Common Room.
- Address
-
- Room
- 0.08A
Abstract
Understanding the events (e.g., chopping an onion, walking to the bus stop) happening in the world around us is fundamental to our everyday lives. The area of study in cognitive science dealing with this human trait at the interface of perception, action and memory, is called “event cognition”.
We often encounter events through language, i.e., by communicating about the things that are happening in our lives. This means that, when studying event cognition, it is crucial to take into account how events are conceptualized and described linguistically. Furthermore, given that events can be described in different ways both within one and the same language, and across different languages, I ask, to what extent linguistic variation may guide or shape our event cognition. I will present psycholinguistic studies that investigate how people conceptualize, perceive and memorize events of different types, with the aim of shedding light on the relation between language and (event) cognition.