Date: 28.3.2017

Participants:  Galit, Eva, Henry, Aviv, Ori

Presenter: Galit

Summary:

This was a joint meeting, together with the langauge processing chevruta.  Galit presented her work on mental representations in langauge.  She began with some background on the semantics of representations and how they relate to different linguistic structures.  We discussed whether some sentence structures are more basic than others.

Specifically, a "straightforward" positive sentence seems to require less cognitive processing than a sentence that includes a negation or a passive action.  We discussed the claim that the added difficulty in these cases is a result of a more complicated syntactic structure rather than a semantic difference in the mental representation.  Galit presented her research into this claim while focusing on the case of negation, and how its syntactic structure requires added cognitive processing.