Home > Events > LangSci Lunch Talk: Zoe Ovans (NACS, HESP)

LangSci Lunch Talk: Zoe Ovans (NACS, HESP)

Time: 
Thursday, April 19, 2018 - 12:30 PM to 1:30 PM
Location: 
2130 H. J. Patterson (LSC)


How is online sentence processing affected by cognitive control limitations during development?

Many recent studies in the developmental psycholinguistics literature have sought to attribute differences in they way children and adults process particular sentences to differences in extralinguistic skills such as cognitive control, as opposed to differences in their underlying mental grammar. Generally, it is believed that having limited cognitive control makes it particularly difficult to revise an interpretation for a given sentence upon encountering late-arriving evidence telling you that your original parse was incorrect. I will present some evidence that for 5-year-olds, having limited cognitive control capabilities can affect the way they process sentences in real time in a new way: by pushing them to rely more on reliable cues to argument structure, and not solely by making it more difficult to overcome their initial interpretation.

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Food and ideas bring people together. Our weekly lunch talk series provides students and faculty with the opportunity to present their in-progress work to a supportive, interdisciplinary audience.

Lunch is served starting at 12:15pm.