Language Science Lunch Talk: Ellen Lau (EDUC)

Wherefore art thou N400?

Abstract: 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 sentence interpretation has changed since then. Sentence processing research tends to focus on the processes needed for 'activating' and relating general concepts to each other in a way that allows action, inference, and reasoning in the moment. But I will argue that we can't understand sentence comprehension without taking into account the extra processes and design features required for language to be able to reference and update a massive long-term knowledge database of particular entities, events, and locations. I will speculate about how we might try to investigate those processes with neurophysiological data. 

Ellen Lau is an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics and the Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Program at the University of Maryland. Lau serves as the Co-Director of the KIT-Maryland MEG Lab and frequently collaborates with the Maryland Language Science Center. 

Lunch served at 12:15 PM. Vegetarian options availalble. Let us know if you have other dietary restrictions.