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School of Languages, Linguistics and Film

CANCELLED!!! Guest Speaker Seminar Series | Ellen Lau

6 May 2020

Time: 4:30 - 6:00pm
Venue: Scape 1.04

We are pleased to welcome Dr Ellen Lau (University of Maryland), who will present some of her recent research:

Towards neural measures of syntactic representation

Neural measures of syntactic representation would be a useful complement to behavioral sources of evidence for theories of syntactic knowledge and processing, but no consensus measures have been identified thus far. Whether such measures can be found depends in part on whether short-term memory representations of syntactic relations are implemented through sustained changes in the activity of many neurons, of the kind that can be measured by non-invasive human neurophysiological recording methods. In this talk I will present ongoing work from our group that uses EEG and MEG to look at whether sustained activity mechanisms are used to encode local and/or non-local syntactic dependencies. In both cases, we identify candidate sustained responses, but further experiments are needed to determine whether they reflect syntactic encoding per se. I will end by stepping back to consider what we can deduce from past work about *where* in the brain are the units that encode these short-term memory representations of syntactic relations. 

 

For more information, please contact events organiser Elvis Coimbra-Gomes (ling-events@qmul.ac.uk).