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Research in the School of Psychology

Language, Cognition and Development seminars

May 19th 2011 - Professor Jeff Elman  (UCSD) - Title: Words and dinosaur bones: Lexical knowledge without a lexicon? 

The talk will be Thursday 19 May at 4:00 pm in Brigantia, room 342. Coffee and tea will be available from 3:30 pm - There will be a special wine and cheese reception following the talk  All are welcome. 

Abstract:

For many years, language researchers were not overly interested in words. After all, words vary across language in mostly random and unsystematic ways. Language learners simply had to learn them by rote. Words were uninteresting. Rules were where the exciting action lay, and considerable effort was invested in trying to figure out what the rules of languages are,whether they come from a universal toolbox, and how language learners could acquire them. Over the past decade, however, there has been increasing interest in the lexicon as the locus of users' language knowledge. There is now a considerable body of linguistic and psycholinguistic research that has led many researchers to conclude that the mental lexicon contains richly detailed information about both general and specific aspects of language. Words are in again, it seems. But this very richness of lexical information poses representational challenges for traditional views of the lexicon. In this talk I will present a body of psycholinguistic data, involving both behavioral and event-related potential experiments, that suggest that event knowledge plays an immediate and critical role in the expectancies that comprehenders generate as they process sentences. I argue that this knowledge is on the one hand precisely the sort of stuff that on standard grounds one would want to incorporate in the lexicon, but on the other hand cannot reasonably be placed there. I suggest that in fact, lexical knowledge (which I take to be real) may not properly be encoded in a mental lexicon, but through a very different computational mechanism.

BIO for Jeff Elman. 

rofessor Elman is a world renowned leader in the field of cognitive science. He developed the TRACE model of speech processing along with Jay McClelland.  He is the Dean of Social Sciences at UCSD, Co-Director of the KAVILI Institute for Brain and Mind, a Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science, and Chancellor's Associates Endowed Chair.