MPI COLLOQUIUM: DR. EVA WITTENBERG

Title

Uniting two perspectives on studying language comprehension 

Abstract

Language can be studied as a closed system: What are its internal rules or constraints, and how can we formalize them? Which structures give rise to which processing patterns? But language can also be studied as part of our overall cognition: How do the rules and constraints within a language allow us to understand each others’ thoughts, and how can we know the shape of these thoughts? 

In my work as a psycholinguist, I like to work from both perspectives, focusing on linguistic descriptions of events. In this talk, I will present data from experiments conducted over the last ten years that use different approaches and methods, and study different phenomena, from processing light verb constructions to understanding time in events. I argue that our picture of language comprehension needs both the system internal and the interface perspective, and that psycholinguistics has lots to offer to both linguistics and cognitive science.