CeLM Talk: Tuesday 1st Dec

The following CeLM talk will be of interest to CCR members:

Stephen Politzer-Ahles

University of Oxford

Language comprehension involves understanding messages that are implied but not explicitly said. For example, “Sue ate some of the donuts” is often understood to mean that Sue did not eat all of the donuts, even though this is not part of the literal semantic meaning expressed by the utterance. The “not all” interpretation is traditionally thought to result from Gricean reasoning: if Sue had eaten all of the donuts, the speaker would have said she ate all of them; so since the speaker didn’t say that, Sue must not have eaten all of them. How do language users realize unsaid aspects of meaning, and how does the brain carry out this process? In this talk I will present brain and behavioral evidence that 1) the brain processes unsaid, inference-based meaning differently than literal semantic meaning; and 2) the brain can realize unsaid, inference-based meanings rapidly and effortlessly.