Lecture: Jeff Elman

You are invited to the final Cognitive Science Colloquium of the semester.

April 20, 2009
4:00-5:30 p.m.
PY 101

Jeff Elman, Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego, will present, "The role of event knowledge in sentence processing: Arguments against a mental lexicon."

Abstract:
For many years, rules were where the action lay in language research. Words were seen as arbitrary, unsystematic, and relatively uninteresting. Over the past decade, however, there has been increasing interest in the lexicon as the locus of users' language knowledge. There is now a considerable body of linguistic and psycholinguistic research that has led many researchers to conclude that the mental lexicon contains richly detailed information about both general and specific aspects of language. Words are in again, it seems. But this very richness of lexical information poses representational challenges for traditional views of the lexicon. In this talk I will present a body of psycholinguistic data, involving both behavioral and event-related potential experiments, that suggest that event knowledge plays an immediate and critical role in the expectancies that comprehenders generate as they process sentences. I argue that this knowledge is on the one hand precisely the sort of stuff that on standard grounds one would want to incorporate in the lexicon, but on the other hand cannot reasonably be placed there. I suggest that in fact, lexical knowledge (which I take to be real) may not properly be encoded in a mental lexicon, but through a very different computational mechanism.