On May 2, 2023, Ugurcan Vurgun, advised by Anna Papfragou, successfully defended his PhD proposal, entitled "The Mapping between Language and Event Cognition: Evidence from Lexical Aspect” (abstract below). His proposal committee included Kathryn Schuler and Florian Schwarz and was chaired by Gareth Roberts.
Abstract: What is the connection between language and the way we perceive events? Previous research indicates that linguistic distinctions related to the internal time progression of events correspond to features in non-linguistic event representations. In this dissertation, we investigate the mapping between these distinctions in language and event cognition. We first explore how lexical aspect in language impacts the perception of visual events, demonstrating that event perception is a malleable process and can be influenced by the linguistic context. Second, we investigate aspectual coercion, a phenomenon that involves combining sentence units with different aspectual properties, using a novel break detection paradigm that measures processing cost and aspectual commitments simultaneously. Our findings demonstrate that the impact of linguistic cues on aspectual commitments is not always consistent, which contradicts the assumption of a straightforward relationship between linguistic coercion and aspectual commitments. Finally, we employ an eye-tracking design to investigate the real-time interpretation of lexical aspect, predicting that the effects of verbs and noun phrases on aspectual commitments will vary and that the inclusion of adverbial phrases can significantly influence aspectual interpretation. Through these investigations, we aim to contribute to the understanding of the mechanisms underlying event perception and language, ultimately providing new perspectives and solutions to the problem of aspect computation in sentence comprehension.