This coming week, we have our next installment in the McGill Linguistics Colloquium series for the 2024-2025 academic year! This talk will be given by Dr. Linnaea Stockall (Queen Mary University of London) on Friday, November 8 at 3:30PM at Sherbrooke 680 in room 1041. The details of the talk are given below.
Title: The neural bases of linguistic structure building vs. Interpretation across the world’s languages
Abstract: In this talk, I’ll discuss a program of research that combines a very simple single word lexical decision paradigm with concurrent MEG recording to investigate how we assemble complex linguistics units (morphologically complex words and minimal phrases) from their consistent pieces, and how we generate and assess the interpretations that correspond to those structures. I’ll survey evidence my SAVANT team (https://savant.qmul.ac.uk/) and I have now collected from 7 languages (with 3 more in progress) that is consistent with a successive cyclic Y model of grammar, in which initial syntactic composition precedes and feeds subsequent interpretation, and word internal processes rely on the same neural resources and mechanisms as sentential processes.
Linnaea is interested in meeting with students and faculty. If you would like to meet with Linnaea before the talk next Friday, please email me with your availability by Wednesday so that we can schedule accordingly.