Colloquium Breakfast TOMORROW (11/18)!

Please join us as we break our fasts with Diogo Almeida, a psycholinguist and syntactician from MSU!

Here's a summary (you might want to come to the breakfast to get a primer on what all of this means!):

One of the central problems for neurobiological theories of cognition in
general, and language in particular, is how to articulate and integrate
research, to borrow Marr's (1982) terminology, at the computational,
algorithmic and implementational levels of analysis. In this talk, I will
present results of behavioral and electrophysiological experiments that
attempt to uncover indices of information retrieval from the mental
lexicon. I will argue that these indices can be used to tie together
research from different domains of psychology of language (from perception
to comprehension) with research on theoretical linguistics, and can help
establish a mutually constraining relationship across the different levels
of analysis. Based on a series of electrophysiological experiments, I will
suggest that the temporal dynamics of visual word recognition reveal (1)
that access to actual linguistic information occurs at an earlier time
frame than previously thought, (2) how we can begin to tease apart early,
bottom-up lexical recognition from slightly later lexical integration
processes in language comprehension, and (3) that continuous access to
lexical level information over time can, in some circumstances, precipitate
the generation or fine-tuning of specialized forward models in the early,
putatively domain general, visual system.