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LSLT - Ellen Lau / Wherefore art thou N400?

Professor Ellen Lau, grinning with eyes cast downward in thought, standing in front of a window and a framed picture of travel

LSLT - Ellen Lau / Wherefore art thou N400?

Linguistics Thursday, February 8, 2024 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm H.J. Patterson Hall, 2130

February 8, the "Upon Reflection" imprint of the Language Science Lunch Talk series continues with our own Ellen Lau, reflecting on the trajectory of her work in psycho- and neurolinguistics. Preflecting, Ellen writes: "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 semantic interpretation has changed since then; why I believe the term 'activation' leads our cog-neuro theory-building badly astray; and what my hunch is today about the proximal cause of the N400 effect." Relevant here is this line from the Beastie Boys (1998): "Step inside the party, disrupt the whole scene [...] I like my sugar with coffee and cream."

Add to Calendar 02/08/24 12:30:00 02/08/24 13:30:00 America/New_York LSLT - Ellen Lau / Wherefore art thou N400?

February 8, the "Upon Reflection" imprint of the Language Science Lunch Talk series continues with our own Ellen Lau, reflecting on the trajectory of her work in psycho- and neurolinguistics. Preflecting, Ellen writes: "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 semantic interpretation has changed since then; why I believe the term 'activation' leads our cog-neuro theory-building badly astray; and what my hunch is today about the proximal cause of the N400 effect." Relevant here is this line from the Beastie Boys (1998): "Step inside the party, disrupt the whole scene [...] I like my sugar with coffee and cream."

 H.J. Patterson Hall false