2025
Ongoing: Families can find our studies through Children Helping Science and through our own Online Research website.
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April: Anna Papafragou will present a talk called "Events in language and mind" at the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences Colloquium at Johns Hopkins University.
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March: We are delighted to announce that our lab will present several studies at the 38th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing, which will be held at the University of Maryland. We will showcase one talk and two poster presentations. June Choe (with Anna Papafragou) has a talk titled, "Children's sensitivity to informativeness in naming: basic-level vs. superordinate nouns." Madison Paron (with Anna Papafragou) will present a poster titled,"Children use an agent’s goals to determine event culmination" and Ugurcan Vurgin (with Yue Ji and Anna Papafragou) will present a poster titled, "(A)telic Diversity: Evidence from a Novel Meaning Categorization Task."
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February: Anna Papafragou will present a talk called "Dynamic representations of what happens" at the Cognitive Science Colloquium at the University of Maryland.
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January: Our lab will have a strong presence this year at the 98th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Philadelphia! We have five abstracts accepted as talks. Jonathan Lee (with Anna Papafragou) has a talk titled "Social evaluation of disfluency in naturalistic speech". Sarah Hye-yeon Lee (in joint work with Madison Paron and Anna Papafragou) has two talks,"Conceptual and linguistic factors affect how learners name entities with non-canonical structure" and "Conceptions of individuation in objects and events are shared across languages". Tyler Knowlton (joint work with John Trueswell and Anna Papafragou) has a talk titled "The strength of conservativity: Evidence from learnability experiments". June Choe (with Anna Papafragou) has a talk titled "Children's sensitivity to informativeness in naming: basic-level vs. superordinate nouns". Congrats to the whole team!
2024
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October: Anna Papafragou will present a talk called "Events in language and mind" at the Center for the Cognitive Science of Language in China at Beijing Language and Culture University.
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October: Anna Papafragou will present a talk called "Events in language and mind" at NYU's Department of Linguistics.
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September: Anna Papafragou will present a talk called "Events in language and mind" at the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science Colloquium.
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September: Anna Papafragou will present a talk called "Events and objects in mind and language" at the Cognitive Research Seminar in the Psychology Department at Princeton University.
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September: Anna Papafragou will present a talk called "Events and objects in mind and language" at the Cognitive Research Seminar in the psychology department at Princeton University.
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August: Ugurcan Vurgun successfully defended his thesis titled, "From Words to Worlds: Telicity and the Malleability of Event Representations" and has accepted a post doc position as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with Penn Medicine. Congratulations, Ugurcan!
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August: We’re delighted to share that postdoc Tyler Knowlton will be doing a post doc with Alon Hafri in the Linguistics & Cognitive Science department at the University of Delaware. Congratulations, Tyler!
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August: We’re delighted to share that postdoc Andrea Beltrama will be Visiting Assistant Professor in the Linguistics and Cognitive Science department at the University of Delaware. Congratulations, Andrea!
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July: Our lab will be presenting several studies at the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, held in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Our lab will be giving three talks including "Object-event correspondences across languages" by Sarah Lee and Anna Papafragou, "Do cross-linguistic differences influence event perception?" by Yue Ji and Anna Papafragou, "Detecting event construal shifts in aspectual coercion" by Ugurcan Vurgun, Yue Ji, and Anna Papafragou, as well as a talk at the Advances in the Study of Event Cognition symposium organized by Sarah Lee. We will also present three poster presentations including "Forming event units in language and cognition: A cross-linguistic investigation" by Sarah Lee, Ercenur Ünal, and Anna Papafragou, "Event-general conceptual categories organize verb semantics and acquisition cross-linguistically" by Sarah Lee and Anna Papafragou, and "The strength of a universal" by Tyler Knowlton, John Trueswell, and Anna Papafragou.
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June: Our lab will be presenting several studies at Experiments in Linguistic Meaning (ELM) 3, held at the University of Pennsylvania. Our lab will be giving a talk titled "Aspectual coercion: A new method to probe aspectual commitments" by Ugurcan Vurgun, Yue Ji, and Anna Papafragou. We will also present two poster presentations including "Conceptual signatures of atomicity across languages" and "Cross-domain event primitives are reflected in motion verb learning across languages" both by Sarah Lee and Anna Papafragou.
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June: Our very own RA, Olivia Maltz, received the Benjamin Franklin Scholar Summer Research Funding. This allowed Olivia to continue working towards her own research project in our lab this summer! Congrats, Olivia!!
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May: We are delighted to announce that our lab presented several studies at the 37th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing, which was held at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Our lab gave a talk titled "ebunking the stigma of 'disfluency': Perception of interpolation in naturalistic speech" by Jonathan Lee and Anna Papafragou. We also showcased two poster presentations, including "Aspectual coercion: A new method to probe aspectual commitments" by Ugurcan Vurgun, Yue Ji, and Anna Papafragou and "Cross-event lexical features are accessed in verb lexicalization" by Sarah Lee and Anna Papafragou.
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May: We’re delighted to share that postdoc Sami Yousif will soon be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he’ll have ties to both the cognitive and developmental areas. Congratulations, Sami!
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April: We are so excited to announce that our lab presented several studies at the 10th Annual Mid-Atlantic Colloquium of Studies in Meaning (MACSIM), which was held at University of Maryland. Our lab gave a talk titled "The acquisition of superordinates" by June Choe and Anna Papafragou. We also showcased three poster presentations, including "Coercion and event interpretation" by Ugurcan Vurgun, Yue Ji, and Anna Papafragou, "Interpolation in naturalistic speech perception" by Jonathan Lee and Anna Papafragou, and "Coercion processing and aspectual costs" by Ugurcan Vurgun, Yue Ji, and Anna Papafragou.
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April: We are delighted to share that this work is one of the top 10 most-cited papers published in Cognitive Science in 2022-23: Do, M., Papafragou, A., & Trueswell, J. (2022). Encoding Motion Events During Language Production: Effects of Audience Design and Conceptual Salience. Way to go, Monica!
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March: Anna Papafragou will present a talk called "Events in the mind" for the Processing and Evaluating Event Representations (PEER) Workshop at Cornell.
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February: Anna Papafragou will present a talk called "Events in the mind and language" at the UPenn Psychology Colloquium.
January: At the 97th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, our lab presented a talk titled "Acquisition of verb lexicalization biases across spontaneous and caused motion" by Sarah Lee and Anna Papafragou.
2023
December: Undergraduate student Jamie Yuen has won a Millstein Family Undergraduate Research Grant from Penn’s Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships (CURF) for her honors thesis on event cognition (with Sarah Lee and Anna Papafragou). Congratulations, Jamie!
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December: Anna Papafragou joins the Journal of Memory and Language Editorial Board.
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November: We are delighted to have several lab members presenting at the 48th Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD)! Sarah Lee gave a talk on the "Acquisition of verb lexicalization biases across spontaneous and caused motion" (with Anna Papafragou). June Choe presented two posters ("Distributional signatures of superordinate nouns" and "Pragmatic underpinnings of the basic-level bias", both with with Anna Papafragou). It was great to see old and new friends (and some former lab members) at BUCLD.
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November: Anna Papafragou will present a talk called "From theory to experimentation" at an online workshop on ‘Experimental Pragmatics: Bridging Theory and Praxis’.
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October: Anna Papafragou will present a talk called "Informativeness in language production" at the Linguistics colloquium held at The Ohio State University.
October: Anna Papafragou will present a talk called "Events and scalar structure" at a workshop on ‘Gradability and measurement across domains’ held at Rutgers University.
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September: Jamie Yuen will join the lab in the Fall where she'll work on her Psychology Honors thesis. Welcome, Jamie!
August: Anna Papafragou is the new President of the Cognitive Science Society!
August: Our lab alumna Julia Ongchoco has been featured in OMNIA, the magazine for alumni of the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences. Julia shared her experiences as a cognitive science major who is interested in making films.
July: Our lab will be presenting several studies at the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, held in Sydney, Australia. Our lab will be giving two talks including "The goal bias emerges early in motion event inspection and speech planning: Evidence from eye-movements" by Yiran Chen, Anna Papafragou, and John Trueswell as well as a talk at the Space in Context symposium entitled "The Ins and Outs of spatial language" by Anna Papafragou, Myrto Grigoroglou, and Barbara Landau. We will also present four poster presentations including "Structural signatures of individual object and event units" by Sarah Lee, Yue Ji, and Anna Papafragou, "Event units in language and cognition" by Sarah Lee, Alessandra Pintado-Urbanc, Anna Papafragou, and Ercenur Ünal, "Conceptual and linguistic factors affect entity processing and labeling" by Sarah Lee, Lea Mangifesta, and Anna Papafragou, and "Cognitive signatures of aspectual coercion" by Ugurcan Vurgun, Yue Ji and Anna Papafragou.
July: Anna Papafragou will present a talk called "Pragmatics, learnability, and natural concepts" at the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) Conference held at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.
June: Our research assistant Julia Ongchoco has been awarded the Phi Beta Kappa Thesis Prize for her senior thesis. Congratulations, Julia!
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June: Olivia Maltz and Laura Nicole Avilés will join the lab in the Summer as MindCORE Summer Fellows in Interdisciplinary Mind and Brain Studies. Welcome, Olivia and Laura!
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June: What would people think of you if you speak in a foreign accent? A plain language article in Kudos discussed research in our lab studying how speech can affect how we form social attitudes about other people.
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May: We are proud to announce that our lab will present several studies at the Language, Stereotypes, and Social Cognition Workshop, held at Penn. Many of our lab members will present their work including sessions entitled"Listeners’ social evaluations of foreign-accented speakers" by Martin Ho Kwan Ip and Anna Papafragou, "Persona-based social expectations in sentence processing and comprehension" by June Choe, and "Personae, charity, and imprecision. How social information shapes pragmatic reasoning" by Andrea Beltrama and Florian Schwarz.
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April: We’re excited to share that Yiran Chen, one of our current graduate students, will join us as a post-doctoral fellow in Dr. Jenny Saffran's Infant Learning Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Congratulations Yiran, and best of luck with your future endeavors!
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April: We’re delighted to share that Alessandra Pintado-Urbanc, our current Lab Manager, will join the Linguistics Ph.D. program at Yale University in the Fall of 2023. Congratulations, Alessandra, and best of luck in graduate school!
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April: We are so excited to announce that our lab presented several studies at the 9th Annual Mid-Atlantic Colloquium of Studies in Meaning (MACSIM), which was held at Penn this year. We showcased two poster presentations, including "Aspectual framing of events shifts online event apprehension" by Ugurcan Vurgun and "Discourse effects on the acquisition of subordinate nouns" by June Choe.
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April: Our research assistant Julia Ongchoco has been awarded the Robert J. Glushko Outstanding Undergraduate Award in Cognitive Science at Penn! The award is given to a student in their senior year with the best combination of academic excellence, strong potential for cognitive science, and/or demonstrated leadership in cognitive science initiatives at the University and beyond. Julia has also completed her undergraduate thesis (“Language Shifts the Representation of Sounds in Time: From Auditory Individuals to Auditory Ensembles”) with Tyler Knowlton and Anna Papafragou. Congratulations, Julia!
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March: Anna Papafragou was interviewed by Sami Yousif for the 'Behind the CV' series organized by MindCORE.
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March: We are delighted to announce that our lab presented several studies at the 36th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing, which was held at the University of Pittsburgh. We showcased two talks and three poster presentations, including "Linguistic and Cognitive Event Units across Languages" by S. Lee, A. Pintado-Urbanc, A. Papafragou & E. Unal, "Labeling novel entities in mass-count and classifier languages" by S. Lee, L. Magnifesta, Y. Ji, & A. Papafragou, "Discourse effects on the acquisition of subordinate nouns" by J. Choe and A. Papafragou, "Aspectual Processing and Event Perception" by U. Vurgun, Y. Ji & A. Papafragou, and "The Goal Bias Emerges Early in Motion Event Inspection and Speech Planning: Evidence from Eye-Movements" by Y. Chen, A. Papafragou, & J. Trueswell.
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February: Our lab manager Alessandra Pintado-Urbanc has been named as a 2022-2023 Dean's Scholar. The award recognizes outstanding students within the School of Arts & Sciences for their academic performance and intellectual promise. Congratulations, Alessandra!
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February: We’re delighted to share that Ebony Goldman, a former undergraduate member of our lab, will join the Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences program at the CUNY Graduate Center in the Fall of 2023. Congratulations, Ebony, and good luck in graduate school!
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February: We are happy to announce that our studies titled 'From Event Representation to Linguistic Meaning' (Topics in Cognitive Science) and 'The Role of Executive Function and Theory of Mind in Pragmatic Computations' (Cognitive Science) are among the top cited articles published between 1 Jan 2021 - 15 Dec 2022 in the respective journals.
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January: Our lab had a strong presence this year at the 96th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America! We had four abstracts accepted as talks and one abstract accepted as a poster. Sarah Hye-yeon Lee (with Yue Ji and Anna Papafragou) gave two talks, "Linguistic and non-linguistic factors support entity construal and word learning" and "Conceptual underpinnings of linguistic atomicity". Sarah Hye-yeon Lee (in joint work with Alessandra Pintado-Urbanc, Anna Papafragou, and Ercenur Ünal) also gave a talk on "Segmenting events in language and cognition". Tyler Knowlton (joint work with John Trueswell and Anna Papafragou) had a talk titled "Non-conservative quantifiers are unlearnable". Ugurcan Vurgun, in joint work with Yue Ji and Anna Papafragou, presented the poster "Aspectual framing of events shifts online event apprehension".
2022
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November: We are delighted to have several lab members presenting at the 47th Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD)! June Choe gave a talk on the "Lexical alternatives and the acquisition of subordinate nouns" (with Anna Papafragou), and Victor Gomes presented his work on "Differentiating universal quantifiers by differentiating their domains" (with Tyler Knowlton, Anna Papafragou, and John Trueswell). Tyler Knowlton ("Non-conservative quantifiers are unlearnable" with Anna Papafragou) and Sarah Lee ("Conceptual and linguistic factors affecting entity construal" with Yue Ji and Anna Papafragou) presented posters during the conference.
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November: Anna Papafragou gave a talk at the Symposium of the Society for Language Development in Boston, right before the BUCLD conference. The Symposium is dedicated to event representation in language, learning, and memory.
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October: Anna Papafragou gave an invited Linguistics colloquium at the University of Connecticut.
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September: Anna Papafragou had an invited talk at the Experimental Pragmatics (XPRAG) conference, Pavia, Italy.
September: Anna Papafragou has been awarded a Penn Mellon Fellowship. The Mellon Fellows program is intended “to orient arts and humanities faculty to the fundamentals of leadership roles, encourage collaboration and community across departments and disciplines, and build the next generation of higher education leaders inflected with humanistic culture and values.”
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July: We're delighted that Sarah Lee won the Gibson-Fedorenko 2022 HSP young scholar's award. Her first-authored presentation ("Where do you think the ball is?: Using webcam-based eye-tracking to investigate mental representations of object locations in transfer-of-possession events") was selected as one of the two best young scholar presentations at HSP 2022. The Gibson/Fedorenko young scholar award was established in 2022 and honors young scholars who present outstanding scientific work as a talk at the annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing. The prize comes with a monetary award of $1000.
July: Many of us were at the 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2022) hosted at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. Tyler Knowlton gave a talk on joint work with John Trueswell and Anna Papafragou ("A mentalistic semantics explains "each" and "every" quantifier use"). Ugurcan Vurgun presented his poster in joint work with Yue Ji and Anna Papafragou titled, "Linguistic aspect constrains event apprehension", and Yiran Chen presented her poster in joint work with John Trueswell and Anna Papafragou titled, "The Source-Goal asymmetry in motion events: Sources are robustly encoded in memory but overlooked at the test". June Choe, Yue Ji, and Martin Ip also presented posters on work with Anna Papafragou. June's poster is titled, "The acquisition of subordinate nouns as pragmatic inference: Semantic alternatives modulate subordinate meanings". Yue presented two posters titled, "Viewers Spontaneously Represent Event Temporal Structure," and, "Events and Objects Are Similar Cognitive Entities". Martin also presented two posters ("Integrating Non-Native Speaker Identity in Semantic and Pragmatic Processing" and "Listeners evaluate native and non-native speakers differently (but not in the way you think.)"). Our team also organized and presented at a symposium on universality and diversity in event representation at CogSci.
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June: Sarah Lee has been selected as a data science postdoctoral fellow by Penn SAS's Data Driven Discovery Initiative. As a data science postdoctoral fellow, Sarah will join an exciting group of postdocs spanning the social and natural sciences who use data science as a significant part of their research and are interested in cross-disciplinary interactions.
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June: Our lab is participating in the Penn LENS program, where a high school student joins the lab and takes part in research. Over the course of four weeks, we will provide guidance and mentorship to a Philadelphia district high school student to aid them in developing laboratory and research skills.
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May: Our lab was well represented at the 2nd Conference on Experiments in Linguistic Meaning to be hosted by the University of Pennsylvania. Ugurcan Vurgun ("Lexical aspect maps onto event apprehension" with Yue Ji and Anna Papafragou) and Yiran Chen ("Source-Goal asymmetry in motion events: Sources are robustly encoded in memory but overlooked at test" with Anna Papafragou and John Trueswell) gave talks. Yue Ji ("Conceptual foundations of telicity"), Dionysia Saratsli ("Can ‘hard words’ become easy? Mapping evidential meanings onto different forms"), and June Choe ("Beyond the basic level: Levels of informativeness and the acquisition of subordinate nouns") presented posters on their work with Anna Papafragou. Tyler Knowlton presented joint work with John Trueswell and Anna Papafragou titled "Psycho-semantic representations explain “each” and “every” quantifier use".
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April: Dionysia Saratsli successfully defended her thesis titled, "The Learnability of Semantic Distinctions: The Case of Evidentiality" and has accepted a position as a Language Engineer with Alexa Local Information's Natural Language Understanding team. Congratulations, Dionysia!
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March: Anna Papafragou gave an invited talk at the University of Oslo.
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March: Lots of us in the lab were at the 35th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing held virtually. Dionysia Saratsli gave a talk (“When ‘hard words’ become easy: Learning evidential meanings across different forms”, with A. Papafragou). Yue Ji had two posters, “Conceptual Foundations of Aspect: Spontaneous Representation of Boundedness in Event Perception” and “Individuation in Language and Cognition: Similarities Between Objects and Events” (both with A. Papafragou). June Choe also presented his poster, “Beyond the basic level: Levels of informativeness and the acquisition of subordinate nouns” (with A. Papafragou). Tyler Knowlton and Yiran Chen will both presented joint work with Anna Papafragou and John Trueswell. Tyler’s poster was titled, “Psycho-semantic representations explain “each” and “every” quantifier use,” and Yiran Chen’s poster was titled, “Source-Goal asymmetry in motion events: Sources are robustly encoded in memory but overlooked at test”.
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February: Anna Papafragou gave invited talks on her recent work on event representation in the Linguistics Colloquium series at the University of Athens, Greece, the Linguistics Colloquium series at Michigan State University, and the University of Cologne, Germany.
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February: We are excited to welcome Sarah Lee to the lab as a postdoc! Sarah received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Southern California. She uses various experimental methods to examine event representations in language and the mind. How are events represented in the mind? How do mental representations of events relate to linguistic representations of events? Currently, she is specifically interested in the internal temporal structure/complexity of events. She also has broader interests that revolve around meaning and its interfaces - specific topics include evidentiality, subjectivity, comparison classes, and more!
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February: The Oxford Handbook of the Mental Lexicon, co-edited by Anna Papafragou, John Trueswell, and Lila Gleitman, is now out! The volume brings together linguistic, psychological, philosophical, and neuroscientific perspectives on how words are represented in the human mind, acquired by young children, and used during conversation. The book is dedicated to the memory of Lila, who passed away at the age of 91 as the book was going to press.
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January: Our lab had a strong presence again this year at the 96th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America! We had three abstracts accepted as talks, and one lab member participated in the 5-minute Linguist competition. Dionysia Saratsli gave her talk, "Acquiring evidentials: mapping meaning onto forms" (Saratsli, D. & Papafragou, A.), Yiran Chen gave her talk, "Encoding transfer events" (Chen, Y., Papafragou, A., and Trueswell, J.), and Ariel Mathis gave her talk, "Is pragmatic (goal) information used in children's computation of event culmination?" (Mathis, A. & Papafragou, A.). Yue Ji gave her presentation, "The temporal structure of events: Relations between language and thought," (Ji, Y. & Papafragou, A.) during the 5-minute Linguist competition.
2021
Ongoing: We are excited to announce our newly expanded online research. Since last year, we have been working to move our studies with children online to make them more accessible to families who want to participate. Families can now find our studies through Children Helping Science and through our own Online Research website.
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December: Anna Papafragou was an invited discussant for an Abralin ao Vivo talk on event representation.
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December: Anna Papafragou talks about the extraordinary Lila Gleitman in a tribute by Cognitive Science Society.
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November: Martin Ho Kwan Ip's CoEDL community reflection was featured in the ARC Center of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language's Director Weekly Highlights for the week of November 5.
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November: Our lab had a strong presence at the virtual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD). Katherine Trice presented her talk titled, "Pragmatic inference and social cognition in acquiring (and remembering) word meanings" (Trice, K., D. Saratsli, A. Papafragou & Z. Qi). Our lab also had 4 posters at BUCLD this year: "Acquiring ‘hard’ spatial prepositions: The case of ‘between’" (Skordos, D., M. Johanson, & A. Papafragou), "Do children use pragmatic (goal) information to compute event culmination?" (Mathis, A.& A. Papafragou), "A cross-linguistic bias in motion path encoding" (Grigoroglou, M., M. Johanson & A. Papafragou), and "Mapping evidential meanings onto different forms" (Saratsli, D., & A. Papafragou). Both Katherine Trice and Dionysia Saratsli won the Paula Menyuk Award for their first-authored submissions. The award is given to the highest-rated abstracts first-authored by a student. Congratulations to all!
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October: : Anna Papafragou gave a talk on representing events in language and cognition as part of the Linguistics Colloquium series at the University of Southern Carolina.
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October: Anna Papafragou presented a talk on acquiring spatial language and spatial concepts at the PINA colloquium in Potsdam.
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October: Anna Papafragou gave a talk on representing events during a seminar in Boston College.
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July: Our lab had a talk and two posters at the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Martin Ip gave his talk "Listeners evaluate native and non-native speakers differently (but not in the way you think)" (Ip, M. & Papafragou, A.). Dionysia Saratsli presented her poster "Pragmatic bias and the learnability of semantic distinctions" (Saratsli, D. & Papafragou, A.) and Andrea Beltrama presented his poster "We are what we say: Pragmatic violations have social costs" (Beltrama, A. & Papafragou, A.).
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July: Anna Papafragou led a session on "Language and Event Representation" at the CEU Summer School in Object and Event Cognition in Budapest.
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June: Dionysia Saratsli started a summer position as a Linguist Engineer at Facebook Reality Labs (via Collabera Inc).
She worked on improving user experience by ensuring end-to-end conversational excellence (NLG, NLU) of Facebook NLP products and developing responsible AI (focusing on Integrity) for a virtual assistant
June: Anna Papafragou gave a talk about event conceptualization in language production and acquisition at the School of Psychology Colloquium Series, University of New South Wales.
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June: We're delighted that Martin Ip has won the inaugural Diversity and Social Inequality Award from the Cognitive Science Society! This prize recognizes “the best work at the Cognitive Science Society annual conference that tackles issues of diversity and social inequality.” Martin is the first author on the paper “Listeners evaluate native and non-native speakers differently (but not in the way you think)” (Anna Papafragou is the second author). The prize carries the amount of $1,000USD for the co-authors. Congratulations, Martin!
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June: Anna Papafragou presented a talk on Informativeness in language production and acquisition at the Distinguished Speakers in Language Science Colloquium Series at Saarland University.
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June: Lab alumna Myrto Grigoroglou presented her work with Anna Papafragou titled "Speaker adjustments to addressees during language production" at the virtual Conference on Mutual Knowledge (MK40).
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May: Lab alumna Yue Ji presented her work with Anna Papafragou titled "Children are sensitive to the internal profile of events" at the 12th Dubrovnik Conference on Cognitive Science.
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May: Anna Papafragou has been awarded a new NSF grant on "Event structure in language and cognition". This project addresses key questions about the nature of events: How do we represent events in thought? How do novice (child) and experienced (adult) communicators use language to encode event representations? Do speakers of different languages think about events in the world differently? This deeply interdisciplinary research offers unique training opportunities in the cognitive sciences at the postdoctoral, graduate, and undergraduate level, and includes international collaborations. Please get in touch if you would like to get involved!
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April: Anna Papafragou joined the team of Associate Editors in Language Learning and Development. The journal is the official publication of the Society for Language Development.
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March: Anna Papafragou gave a Linguistics Colloquium on event structure in language and cognition at the University of Southern California.
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March: Anna Papafragou gave a Linguistics Colloquium on event representation in the Department of Linguistic at University College London.
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March: Anna Papafragou delivered the Harold Schlosberg Colloquium in the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences at Brown University. Her talk addressed relations between cognition and language.
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March: Our lab had two posters at the virtual 34th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing! Martin Ip presented his poster "The social benefits of being a non-native speaker," (Ip, M. & Papafragou, A.), and Andrea Beltrama presented his poster "The social cost of maxims violations: Pragmatic behavior informs speaker evaluation," (Beltrama, A. & Papafragou, A.).
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March: Anna Papafragou joined a number of University of Pennsylvania faculty members in co-organizing the 34th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing! This year's virtual conference took place March 4-6.
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January: Anna Papafragou had a fun virtual visit with the University of Chicago's Department of Linguistics! Anna gave her talk. "Event representations in language and cognition," as part of the department's Colloquium series.
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January: This year, our lab had a strong presence at the 95th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America! Dionysia Saratsli gave her talk, "The role of social cognition in word learning: Meaning retention and pragmatic inferences" (Saratsli, D., Papafragou, A., & Qi, Z.) and Andrea Beltrama gave his talk, "The social cost of violating maxims: How pragmatic reasoning informs speaker evaluation" (Beltrama, A. & Papafragou, A.). Dionysia also presented her poster, "Pragmatic effects on the acquisition of novel evidentials" (Saratsli, D. & Papafragou, A.) and Martin Ip presented his poster, "Socio-pragmatic meaning from non-native speech signals" (Ip, M. & Papafragou, A.).