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• Yao-Ying Lai (National Chengchi University, Taiwan)

dans le cadre DENDY : Dendy'n Science

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Abstract:
The meaning of a sentence largely comes from the meanings of the lexical items and the way they are syntactically combined, following the Principle of Compositionality. Nonetheless, the full-fledged interpretation often goes beyond explicit morphosyntactic cues, involving a piece of meaning that is nontransparent/unstated at the compositional level. Our research aims to understand how comprehenders obtain such nontransparent meaning and the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms, by identifying the linguistic and individual factors that modulate the real-time processing. In this talk, I will discuss a line of studies that address these issues through a series of behavioral and neuroimaging experiments with cross-linguistic investigation (English, Japanese, Chinese). The results suggest that combinatorial nontransparent meaning is computed via an integrative contextual evaluation, preferentially recruiting a left-lateralized frontal-temporal/parietal network independent of morphosyntax. The processing profiles, including the activation of this cortical network, vary with both intra-/extra-sentential context and individuals’ context sensitivity tying to socio-cognitive propensity. The findings clarify the neurocognitive underpinnings of linguistic meaning composition and suggest a role of social cognition in language processing.

Info:
Professor Lai seeks to understand how our cognitive system and brain work to obtain the meaning of linguistic expressions in context. Specifically, she focuses on lexical-conceptual representation, semantic composition and underspecification, contextualization of sentential meaning, as well as the architecture of conceptual structure that supports human language processing.
Lab website of Prof. Lai: https://www.yaoyinglai.com/