Event Structure in Language and Cognition

人类在解释周围发生的事情方面出奇地娴熟。我们能够认识到动态事件，各种实体在这些事件中扮演的角色，以及促成事件的因果关系和其他关系。此外，我们使用语言来描述我们的动态体验，以反映我们对潜在事件的理解。尽管事件在人类认知和语言中起着核心作用，但直到最近，认知科学中对事件的研究仍然是支离破碎的。这项研究引入了新的理论和经验工具来解决关于事件本质的关键问题：我们如何在思维中表现事件？新手(儿童)和有经验的(成人)交际者如何使用语言对事件表征进行编码？说不同语言的人对世界上的事件有不同的看法吗？这项拟议的研究提出了一种新的综合方法来研究思维研究中最基本的主题之一，即认知和语言之间的联系。由于其深厚的跨学科性质，该项目在博士后、研究生和本科生水平上提供了独特的认知科学培训机会。此外，该项目使受训人员接触到国际合作的兴奋，并促进了新的学术合作伙伴关系。该项目包括为社区感兴趣的成员开展的外展和指导活动，这些成员可能不会接触到学术研究。拟议研究的一个独特之处在于，它汇集了关于事件结构的两个有影响力但不同的研究方向，一个研究事件表征的知觉和认知机制，另一个专注于语言学中的事件语义。在这两个主要研究方法的基础上，本研究提出事件的内部时间结构是事件认知的建筑特征。一系列计划中的实验旨在表明，时间事件结构在事件感知过程中迅速而自发地计算出来，影响进一步的认知过程，如事件记忆，并在成人和儿童以及说不同语言的人之间组织事件表征。这种方法和理论的创新组合使我们能够探索事件认知和事件语言之间以前隐藏的联系，并有可能揭示事件表示的准确格式及其与语言的映射，这些到目前为止仍然难以捉摸。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Humans are surprisingly adept at interpreting what is happening around them. We are able to recognize dynamic events, the roles that various entities play in these events and the causal and other relations that contribute to events. Furthermore, we use language to describe our dynamic experiences in ways that reflect our underlying event understanding. Despite the central role of events in human cognition and language, the study of events within the cognitive sciences has until recently remained fragmented. This research introduces novel theoretical and empirical tools to address 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? The proposed research presents a new and integrated approach to one of the most fundamental topics in the study of the mind, namely the connection between cognition and language. Because of its deeply interdisciplinary nature, this project offers unique training opportunities in the cognitive sciences at the postdoctoral, graduate, and undergraduate level. Moreover, the project exposes trainees to the excitement of international collaborations and fosters new academic partnerships. The project includes outreach and mentorship activities for interested members of the community who may not otherwise be exposed to academic research.A unique feature of the proposed research is that it brings together two influential but separate lines of research on the structure of events, one studying perceptual and cognitive mechanisms of event representation, and the other focusing on the semantics of events in linguistics. Building on these two major approaches, this research proposes that the internal temporal structure of an event is an architectural feature of event cognition. A planned series of experiments aims to show that temporal event structure is computed rapidly and spontaneously during event perception, affects further cognitive processes such as event memory, and organizes event representations in both adults and children, and across people who speak different languages. This innovative combination of methods and theories allows us to explore previously hidden links between event cognition and event language and has the potential to reveal the precise format of event representations and their mapping to language that have so far remained elusive.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.