Winter Storm - Alon Hafri / Thematic relations
Winter Storm - Alon Hafri / Thematic relations
Thursday January 22, the Language Science Center brings Alon Hafri from the University of Delaware into its Winter Storm, to give a talk on "Thematic relations: Shared constraints in the mind across vision and language."
Language and vision, two domains central to cognitive science, are often studied independently. Yet there is increasing evidence that both encode the world in terms of relations and roles (e.g., Agent, Patient, Figure, Reference). This raises a fundamental question: to what extent do these systems share not just representational ingredients, but constraints on what can be represented and how? In this talk, I explore the possibility that certain constraints on linguistic representation reflect deeper constraints in non-linguistic cognition, particularly high-level vision. I first present work suggesting that visual scene understanding is, in some cases, compositional: relational representations (e.g., a vase on a table) are constructed sequentially and in a canonical order that mirrors how relations are conceptually composed in sentence interpretation. I then show that visual cognition also exhibits limits on which relations can be simultaneously represented. Using the spatial relations IN and NEAR, I show that rapid proximity judgments (a prerequisite for NEAR evaluations) are selectively impaired when objects instantiate containment, paralleling the linguistic oddness of describing a ball as “near” a box when it is “inside” it. Finally, I discuss constraints on verb meanings in terms of conceptual and syntactic role mappings. Languages appear to systematically lack “inverse verbs” that reverse the canonical Agent–Subject / Patient–Object mapping, and I present cross-linguistic evidence from adult learners that verbs with such a mapping are difficult to learn. These findings open up the possibility that such linking generalizations reflect either properties of the mental grammar or more basic constraints on event representation—possibilities we are currently exploring. Taken together, these findings suggest that some constraints on linguistic structure may have non-linguistic origins, reflecting shared limits on relational representation across language and vision.