[CANCELED] LSLT: Ellen Lau (LING)

We hope to reschedule this talk for later in the fall or next semester!

LSLT: Upon Reflection. This semester, we've asked presenters to give reflective talks about their most prominent work from the past. How did they understand the question then, and how do they see it now? See the full lineup here! Lunch will be served starting at 12:15. Vegetarian options available. Let us know if you have other dietary restrictions!

This week: Ellen Lau, Associate Professor of Linguistics

Wherefore art thou N400?

I spent a lot of my early career using a famous ERP language measure, the N400 effect (Kutas 1980), to study the predictions people make in sentence comprehension. In Lau, Phillips, and Poeppel (2008), we laid the grounds for that later work by using neural localization data to argue that the N400 effect reflected 'pre-activation of lexical or conceptual features' rather than combinatorial or integrative processes. In this talk I'll discuss how my thinking about semantic interpretation has changed since then; why I believe the term 'activation' leads our cogneuro theory-building badly astray; and what my hunch is today about the proximal cause of the N400 effect.