Lunch Talks

Sophie Scott (Director, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL) In this talk I will explore the neuroscience and evolution of laughter, a positive emotional vocalisation. I will draw parallels between human use of laughter and laugher and play vocalisations in other mammals, and I will also show some distinct differences between humans and other animals. I […]

  Martin Pickering (Department of Psychology, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences) Abstract: People sometimes interpret implausible sentences nonliterally, for example treating "The mother gave the candle the daughter" as meaning the daughter receiving the candle. But how do they do so? We contrasted a nonliteral syntactic analysis account, according to which people compute […]

Isabelle Darcy Indiana University / ILCB / IMéRA Listening to speech in your native language is easy. Recognizing the words spoken in conversation is generally an automatic and smooth everyday process in the first language (L1). Even in noisy or otherwise less than ideal conditions, performance is surprisingly robust. But anyone who has attempted to […]