Linguistics Seminar
Seminars typically take place each Monday from 4-5 PM, either in-person or over Zoom. In-person seminars are normally held in the Lucy Ellis Lounge (LCLB 1080).
Contact Josh Dees for Zoom links and details and if you’d like to be added to the mailing list and receive announcements of new talks every week.
Spring 2024 Schedule
- 29-Jan: LingSS Talk: Kara Federmeier (UIUC, Psychology)
- Talk Title: Connecting and considering: How the brain finds meaning in time
- Abstract:
Humans have the remarkable ability to link perceptual stimuli with long-term memory – i.e., to glean the meaning of those stimuli – in a manner that is persistent and rapid but also flexible and goal-oriented. Work in my laboratory has revealed that in a relatively invariant time window, uncovered through studies using the N400 component of the event-related potential, incoming sensory information naturally induces a graded landscape of activation across semantic memory, creating what might be called "proto-concepts". This process of "connecting" affords the continuous infusion of meaning into human perception. Connecting can be -- but is not always -- followed by a process of further "considering" those activations through a set of more attentionally-demanding comprehension mechanisms. This kind of active comprehension entails selection, augmentation, and transformation of the initial semantic representations. The result is a limited set of more stable bindings that can be arranged in time or space, revised as needed, and brought to awareness. Collectively, these findings reveal the complex relations among sensory processing, attention, memory, and control systems that allow people to both rapidly and flexibly understand one another across the lifespan.
- 1-Feb (Thursday): LingSS Talk: Adrienne Washington (WVU)
- 19-Feb: Grad Workshop: Tania Ionin, Aylin Coşkun Kunduz, Ping-Lin Chuang, Britni Moore
- Applying for Research funding
- 26-Feb: Grad Workshop: Anna Mendoza
- Literature Review Reading and Writing
- 4-Mar: LingSS Talk: Lin Chen (UIUC, Educational Psychology)
- 18-Mar: LingSS Talk: Tomas Riad (Stockholm U)
- 25-Mar: LingSS Talk: Seth Cable (UMass)
- 8-Apr: Grad Workshop: Jonathan Dunn
- Computational Skills for Linguists
- 22-Apr: LingSS Talk: Yunwen Su (UIUC, EALC)
- 29-Apr: LingSS Talk: Amanda Brown
For a list of seminars held in previous semesters, please see Past Seminars.