Language & Cognition Lab

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November: We are delighted to have several lab members presenting at the 47th Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD) on November 3 - 6! June Choe gave a talk on the "Lexical alternatives and the acquisition of subordinate nouns" (with Anna Papafragou), and Victor Gomes presented his work on "Differentiating universal quantifiers by differentiating their domains" (with Tyler Knowlton, Anna Papafragou, and John Trueswell). Tyler Knowlton ("Non-conservative quantifiers are unlearnable" with Anna Papafragou) and Sarah Lee ("Conceptual and linguistic factors affecting entity construal" with Yue Ji and Anna Papafragou) presented posters during the conference.

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November: Anna Papafragou gave a talk at the Symposium of the Society for Language Development in Boston, right before the BUCLD conference. The Symposium is dedicated to event representation in language, learning, and memory.

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October: Anna Papafragou gave an invited Linguistics colloquium at the University of Connecticut.

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September: Anna Papafragou had an invited talk at the Experimental Pragmatics (XPRAG) conference, Pavia, Italy.

September: Anna Papafragou has been awarded a Penn Mellon Fellowship. The Mellon Fellows program is intended “to orient arts and humanities faculty to the fundamentals of leadership roles, encourage collaboration and community across departments and disciplines, and build the next generation of higher education leaders inflected with humanistic culture and values.”

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July: We're delighted that Sarah Lee won the Gibson-Fedorenko 2022 HSP young scholar's award. Her first-authored presentation ("Where do you think the ball is?: Using webcam-based eye-tracking to investigate mental representations of object locations in transfer-of-possession events") was selected as one of the two best young scholar presentations at HSP 2022. The Gibson/Fedorenko young scholar award was established in 2022 and honors young scholars who present outstanding scientific work as a talk at the annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing. The prize comes with a monetary award of $1000.

July: Many of us were at the 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2022) hosted at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre from July 27 - 30. Tyler Knowlton gave a talk on joint work with John Trueswell and Anna Papafragou ("A mentalistic semantics explains "each" and "every" quantifier use"). Ugurcan Vurgun presented his poster in joint work with Yue Ji and Anna Papafragou titled, "Linguistic aspect constrains event apprehension", and Yiran Chen presented her poster in joint work with John Trueswell and Anna Papafragou titled, "The Source-Goal asymmetry in motion events: Sources are robustly encoded in memory but overlooked at the test". June Choe, Yue Ji, and Martin Ip also presented posters on work with Anna Papafragou. June's poster is titled, "The acquisition of subordinate nouns as pragmatic inference: Semantic alternatives modulate subordinate meanings". Yue presented two posters titled, "Viewers Spontaneously Represent Event Temporal Structure," and, "Events and Objects Are Similar Cognitive Entities". Martin also presented two posters ("Integrating Non-Native Speaker Identity in Semantic and Pragmatic Processing" and "Listeners evaluate native and non-native speakers differently (but not in the way you think.)"). Our team also organized and presented at a symposium on universality and diversity in event representation at CogSci.

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June: Sarah Lee has been selected as a data science postdoctoral fellow by Penn SAS's Data Driven Discovery Initiative. As a data science postdoctoral fellow, Sarah will join an exciting group of postdocs spanning the social and natural sciences who use data science as a significant part of their research and are interested in cross-disciplinary interactions.

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June: Our lab is participating in the Penn LENS program, where a high school student joins the lab and takes part in research. Over the course of four weeks, we will provide guidance and mentorship to a Philadelphia district high school student to aid them in developing laboratory and research skills.

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May: Our lab was well represented at the 2nd Conference on Experiments in Linguistic Meaning to be hosted by the University of Pennsylvania from May 18 - 20. Ugurcan Vurgun ("Lexical aspect maps onto event apprehension" with Yue Ji and Anna Papafragou) and Yiran Chen ("Source-Goal asymmetry in motion events: Sources are robustly encoded in memory but overlooked at test" with Anna Papafragou and John Trueswell) gave talks. Yue Ji ("Conceptual foundations of telicity"), Dionysia Saratsli ("Can ‘hard words’ become easy? Mapping evidential meanings onto different forms"), and June Choe ("Beyond the basic level: Levels of informativeness and the acquisition of subordinate nouns") presented posters on their work with Anna Papafragou. Tyler Knowlton presented joint work with John Trueswell and Anna Papafragou titled "Psycho-semantic representations explain “each” and “every” quantifier use". 

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April: Dionysia Saratsli successfully defended her thesis titled, "The Learnability of Semantic Distinctions: The Case of Evidentiality" and has accepted a position as a Language Engineer with Alexa Local Information's Natural Language Understanding team. Congratulations, Dionysia!

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March: Anna Papafragou gave an invited talk at the University of Oslo.

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March: Lots of us in the lab were at the 35th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing held virtually from March 24 – 26. Dionysia Saratsli gave a talk (“When ‘hard words’ become easy: Learning evidential meanings across different forms”, with A. Papafragou). Yue Ji had two posters, “Conceptual Foundations of Aspect: Spontaneous Representation of Boundedness in Event Perception” and “Individuation in Language and Cognition: Similarities Between Objects and Events” (both with A. Papafragou). June Choe also presented his poster, “Beyond the basic level: Levels of informativeness and the acquisition of subordinate nouns” (with A. Papafragou). Tyler Knowlton and Yiran Chen will both presented joint work with Anna Papafragou and John Trueswell. Tyler’s poster was titled, “Psycho-semantic representations explain “each” and “every” quantifier use,” and Yiran Chen’s poster was titled, “Source-Goal asymmetry in motion events: Sources are robustly encoded in memory but overlooked at test”.

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February: Anna Papafragou gave invited talks on her recent work on event representation in the Linguistics Colloquium series at the University of Athens, Greece, the Linguistics Colloquium series at Michigan State University, and the University of Cologne, Germany.

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February: We are excited to welcome Sarah Lee to the lab as a postdoc! Sarah received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Southern California. She uses various experimental methods to examine event representations in language and the mind. How are events represented in the mind? How do mental representations of events relate to linguistic representations of events? Currently, she is specifically interested in the internal temporal structure/complexity of events. She also has broader interests that revolve around meaning and its interfaces - specific topics include evidentiality, subjectivity, comparison classes, and more!

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February: The Oxford Handbook of the Mental Lexicon, co-edited by Anna Papafragou, John Trueswell, and Lila Gleitman, is now out! The volume brings together linguistic, psychological, philosophical, and neuroscientific perspectives on how words are represented in the human mind, acquired by young children, and used during conversation. The book is dedicated to the memory of Lila, who passed away at the age of 91 as the book was going to press.

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January: Our lab had a strong presence again this year at the 96th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America! We had three abstracts accepted as talks, and one lab member participated in the 5-minute Linguist competition. Dionysia Saratsli gave her talk, "Acquiring evidentials: mapping meaning onto forms" (Saratsli, D. & Papafragou, A.), Yiran Chen gave her talk, "Encoding transfer events" (Chen, Y., Papafragou, A., and Trueswell, J.), and Ariel Mathis gave her talk, "Is pragmatic (goal) information used in children's computation of event culmination?" (Mathis, A. & Papafragou, A.). Yue Ji gave her presentation, "The temporal structure of events: Relations between language and thought," (Ji, Y. & Papafragou, A.) during the 5-minute Linguist competition.