Date & time: 27 April; 15:30-17:00

Location: Utrecht University, Janskerkhof 13, Room 0.06

Arnout Koornneef

Utrecht University, UiL-OTS

Anticipating causal relations between events

Implicit causality is a property of some interpersonal verbs in which one or the other of the verb’s arguments is implicated as the underlying cause of the action or attitude. For example, people normally ascribe the underlying cause of the praising-event in a sentence fragment such as David praised Linda because to the object NP (e.g. because she had completed the assignment). In series of self-paced reading, eye-tracking and ERP experiments we showed that this pragmatic implicit causality cue is used to anticipate how the unfolding utterance will continue. Currently, we are pursuing a line of research in which we combine these insights from linguistics with knowledge from visual perception research. More specifically, using neuroimaging techniques (ERP, fMRI) this project investigates the hypothesis that two of our basic cognitive systems – vision and language – make use of the same cognitive components to anticipate causal relations between events.