Colloquium: Dr. Tessa Warren: "Verb knowledge and event knowledge in language comprehension: insights from neurotypical and aphasic comprehension"

Tessa Warren, Associate Professor, Departments of Psychology, Linguistics, and Communication Science and Disorders

 

The role of world knowledge in language comprehension has been hotly debated (e.g. Frazier, 1987; McRae, Ferretti, & Amyote, 1997). Classic theories (e.g. Chomsky, 1965) assumed that general world knowledge and linguistic representations were separate and used at different stages of comprehension. But a newer body of evidence suggests that they may not be dissociable in comprehension (e.g. Hagoort, Hald, Bastiaansen & Petersson, 2004), and that world knowledge might drive many processing effects traditionally attributed to linguistic knowledge (e.g. McRae, Ferretti, & Amyote, 1997). In this talk, I will present a body of work investigating comprehension in neurotypical adults and adults with aphasia that aims to further our understanding of the relationship between verb-based knowledge and event knowledge as well as the roles that they play in language comprehension.