When: Wednesday, February 7, 2024, 4:30 PM - 6:00 PMWhere: ArtsOne 1.28 and Online, Mile End Campus
Suhail Matar (Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language) will give a seminar as part of the Linguistics Guest Speaker Seminar series.
This is a hybrid event, click here to join via Zoom.
Seminar abstract:
Neural basis of structure processing in language comprehension
To fully comprehend language, the brain taps into different structural information embedded in the language input, including syntactic structures and within-word morpheme boundaries. Thus, to understand how the brain comprehends language, we need to research how it extracts structural information through an interplay between bottom-up and top-down (e.g., predictive) processes. But it is challenging to design experiments that isolate these processes, since structural information is tightly linked to perceptible information. In this talk, I will show how some experimentally under-studied languages, such as Arabic, provide unique windows into researching the neural processing of latent linguistic information. Specifically, I will present three examples from my work with magnetoencephalography (MEG) brain recordings, looking into how the brain: (i) predicts syntactic category information in reading; (ii) builds syntactic structures in reading, and (iii) predicts and infers morpheme boundaries in speech comprehension. Finally, I will discuss how we can extend these methods to study other levels of structural linguistic information, such as discourse structures.