Event role biases in language and cognition

Arrate Isasi-Isasmendi, Vanessa Wilson, Sarah Brocard, Sebastian Sauppe, Caroline Andrews

Workshop homepage: https://www.comparativelinguistics.uzh.ch/en/events/event-role-biases-in-language-and-cognition.html

Understanding and interacting with the perceptual world requires the ability to process events (i.e. who does what to whom in an action). The last few years have seen a substantial increase in the research on how events are attended to, both in humans and across other animal species. In parallel, there is a growing body of literature concerned with the processing mechanisms as well as typological trends related to semantic roles in language. Our workshop aims to bring together these lines of research and place them in an evolutionary framework. Accordingly, the workshop will feature contributions spanning several disciplines, including cognitive science, developmental science, comparative social cognition and language processing.

On cognitive science, Alon Hafri will focus on the processing of event objects and relations, Denis Tatone will talk about interpretive asymmetries in the encoding of events, and Lilia Rissman will speak to the conceptual structure of semantic roles. There will be a talk on the evolutionary origins of event cognition: Vanessa Wilson and Sarah Brocard will focus on implicit and explicit event processing in great apes. Finally, the workshop will feature a talk on language processing, by Arrate Isasi-Isasmendi and Sebastian Sauppe.

By bringing these lines of research together, the workshop seeks to obtain new insights into the cognitive roots of event roles in language, and tackle the following questions: what are the evolutionary underpinnings of distinguishing agents and patients in language, and to what extent does semantic role attribution emerge in the absence of language? How do these cognitive mechanisms shape language structure and processing? To what extent are semantic role categories grounded in cognition or dependent on language-specific features?

Confirmed speakers: Alon Hafri, Denis Tatone, Ebru Ger, Lilia Rissman, Vanessa Wilson & Sarah Brocard, Sebastian Sauppe & Arrate Isasi-Isasmendi