Abstract Monique Flecken

Understanding and representing events (e.g., walking to the bus stop, chopping an onion) from the activities happening around us is fundamental to our everyday lives. The field of event cognition studies how people comprehend, perceive and memorize events. Not much emphasis has been placed on the role of language in this domain, even though event descriptions are central to the way in which we use language. In this talk, I will present psycholinguistic studies that investigate how people conceptualize, describe, perceive and memorize events of different types. I take a cross-linguistic approach, contrasting languages that differ in semantics and/or grammar, to shed light on potential linguistic modulation of core cognitive processes.