Event Date: Friday, 8 April, 2022
Location: 11:00-13:00, Aula Magna, Pal. Matteucci
Speaker: Prof. Giosuè Baggio (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
Title: Composition and compositionality in a parallel architecture for language processing
Abstract: Compositionality has been a central concept in linguistics and philosophy for decades, and it is increasingly prominent in many other areas of cognitive science. In this talk, I will outline a language processing architecture where semantic representations may be generated by a syntax-driven stream and by an ‘asyntactic’ processing stream, jointly or independently. Compositionality is viewed as a constraint on computation in the former stream only. I will present a computational model and EEG experiments shedding light on how composition unfolds in this parallel architecture.
Giosuè Baggio studied philosophy, logic and cognitive neuroscience in Pavia, Amsterdam and Nijmegen, where he got his PhD in 2009 working under the supervision of Peter Hagoort and Michiel van Lambalgen. He has worked as postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and as an assistant professor at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste. Since 2014, he is senior manager and principal investigator at the Language Acquisition and Language Processing Lab at NTNU, where he is also professor of psycholinguistics.