How We Learn and Use Sentence Structure during Language Production

Linguistic communication is powerful because we are able to string multiple words together into complex expressions.  This ability, in turn, comes from syntactic structure:  our knowledge of how words, represented in terms of categories like nouns and verbs, can be combined into phrases and sentences.  This lecture discusses recent findings that describe the nature of syntactic representations in language production, especially concerning its abstractness, and the degree to which people tie memory for specific syntactic episodes to the events we describe and the people we speak to.

In collaboration with the Neuroscience of Language Laboratory, NYUAD

Organized by

• David Poeppel, Visiting Professor, Individuals
• Liina Pylkkanen, Associate Professor of Linguistics and Psychology, NYU; Co-Principal Investigator of the Neuroscience of Language Laboratory, NYUAD
• Alec Marantz, Silver Professor of Linguistics and Psychology, NYU; Co-Principal Investigator of the Neuroscience of Language Laboratory, NYUAD