Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Carol Madden Lombardi grew up outside Philadelphia and received an undergraduate degree in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Notre Dame in 1998.  She received her graduate training at the Florida State University, obtaining her Ph.D. in 2004 in Cognitive and Behavioral Sciences.  She subsequently began postdoctoral research at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands, where she was awarded a fellowship for her own research project until 2010, when she began a permanent position with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) at the INSERM Stem Cell and Brain Research Institute in Lyon France.  Her research investigates how we represent described events, with particular focus on the embodied and modality-specific nature of language representations. This research demonstrates how we use cues such as grammar (e.g., verb aspect) to activate appropriate meanings, and how these resulting representations mirror our real perceptual-motor experience.  The current talk describes several experiments that demonstrate the dynamic and perceptual/motor nature of representations using simple sentences and pictures.  Further investigations show how subtle changes in verb grammar can modulate these representations and regulate the flow of events through time.