Dinner Cruise

As the conference is drawing near, now is the time to tell you about an exciting social event we have planned: a dinner cruise on the China Boat through the expansive Rotterdam Port and the City. The boat departs from the Leuvehaven, about a 5-minute walk from the conference hotel. The price is €50 which includes the cruise, dinner buffet, and drinks. While on board, we will enjoy drinks and an elaborate Chinese-Indonesian Rice Table with a large variety of appetizers, entrees, and side dishes (meat, seafood, vegetarian). The dinner cruise is on Monday, July 27 from 7 pm until 10 pm. To sign up for the cruise via the ST&D website, please send an email to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it We hope you will all join us on the China Boat.

Keynote Speakers include:

Art Glenberg (Arizona State University, USA)

Peter Hagoort (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, and Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour)

Peter Hagoort is director of the Max Planck Instute for Psycholinguistics, and the founding director of the F.C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, a cognitive neuroscience research centre at the Radboud University Nijmegen. In addition, he is professor in cognitive neuroscience at the Radboud University Nijmegen. His own research interests relate to the domain of the human language faculty and how it is instantiated in the brain. In his research he applies neuroimaging techniques such as ERP, MEG, PET and fMRI to investigate the language system and its impairments as in aphasia, dyslexia and autism. At the F.C. Donders Centre he is currently heading the research group Neurocognition of Language. At the Max Planck Institute he is heading a department on the neurobiology of language. For his scientific contributions, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts Sciences (KNAW) awarded him with the Hendrik Mullerprijs in 2003. In 2004 he was awarded by the Dutch Queen with the “Knighthood of the Dutch Lion.” In 2005 he received the NWO-Spinoza Prize (M€ 1.5). In 2007 the University of Glasgow awarded him with an honorary doctorate in science for his contributions to the cognitive neuroscience of language. In 2008 he was awarded with the Heymans Prize. Peter Hagoort is fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).

The title of this presentation is: “When elephants fly: discourse processing from an embrained perspective”
Astract: Words are processed in the context of other words. This requires syntactic and semantic unification operations that are recruiting brain areas that are neither motor nor sensory in nature. Interpretation of a sentence also implies verification of content in relation to world knowledge in long term memory. Semantic unification and sentence verification are shown to go hand in hand, while the recruiting the same brain structures. Sentences are very often processed in the context of other sentences (i.e. discourse). This current discourse might overwrite/correct existing world knowledge. I will present ERP data showing that discourse effects are immediate, and, moreover, that world knowledge and discourse interact. fMRI data show that there is a distribution of labour between the left and right inferior frontal cortices while integrating world knowledge and discourse information. Implications for models of language processing will be discussed.

Herbert H. Clark (Stanford University)

Herbert H. Clark is a professor in psychology at Stanford University. He is a foreign member of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Academie van Wetenschappen, and a fellow of the Cognitive Science Society, the American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He was also a visiting scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics at several occasions. He has published papers and books on the psychology of language, particularly sentence comprehension and memory, bridging inferences, and linguistic processes in deductive reasoning is as well as politeness, speech acts, and referring.

The title of this presentation is: Varieties of fictitious experiences
Abstract: Narratives, it is said, are able to transport us to new worlds. When we read Melville’s Moby Dick, we imagine and thereby experience a world in which a mad sea captain named Ahab pursues a great white whale. But by what processes do we imagine that world? As British novelist David Lodge noted, narratives rely on two methods. Sometimes they tell us what happened, using what I will call descriptions. Other times they show us what happened, using what I will call depictions. Novels, short stories, jokes, and newspaper reports rely heavily on description, a process we know a lot about. But plays, movies, graphic novels, and radio and television news reports rely almost entirely on depiction, often in several layers, a process we know little about. The problem is that depictions are radically different from descriptions in the way they enable us to imagine a narrative world. And the two methods are often found in combinations, with one method embedded within, incorporated into, or fused with the other. How does all this work? The ultimate challenge is to understand the many varieties of fictitious experience.

Symposia:

Sunday - New Findings in the Neuroscience of Discourse chair - Jeff Zacks

Research on the neuroscience of discourse is growing dramatically. This symposium will provide an update on current theories of how discourse-level understanding relates to neural phenomena, and will review recent results using functional MRI and evoked response potentials. These new findings address the roles that theory of mind, simulations of events, predictive inferences, and memory-based processes play in discourse understanding.

Monday - Developmental aspects of language comprehension - Kate Cain

In this symposium we focus on young readers’ ability to comprehend text and the skills that underpin its development. The presentations will examine the importance of preschoolers’ vocabulary and discourse-level comprehension skills for the prediction of later reading comprehension, and the manner in which vocabulary knowledge and cohesive devices influence young readers’ ability to construct a coherent and accurate representation of a text’s meaning.

Workshop:

Sunday - Readability, text comprehension and usability: cognitive and computational aspects - Ted Sanders

Ever since the 1970's, readability formulas have had a bad name among researchers, and rightly so. However, more fruitful readability research work should be possible by now. First, a vast amount of empirical knowledge has been gathered in discourse psychology about reading processes and the way in which they are influenced by text characteristics. Second, developments in language technology over the last two decades have provided new possibilities for insightful ways of (semi-) automatic text analysis, which have a recently proven to be very useful in the context of readability. Finally, readability research has taken a new shape in the area of document design, with fruitful research on the usability of 'functional' text genres such as forms, web sites, instructional texts and patient information leaflets.

This international workshop brings together readability and comprehension research from discourse psychology, text linguistics, computational linguistics and document design. The list of speakers:

Danielle McNamara (University of Memphis): readability research involving Coh-Metrix, Tim vor der Brueck (Fernuniversität Hagen): readability checking in German with DeLite, Rogier Kraf & Henk Pander Maat (Utrecht University): readability prediction in Dutch with T-Scan, Ted Sanders (Utrecht University): experimental work on the comprehension of educational texts, Leo Lentz (Utrecht University): improving the usability of patient information leaflets, Regina Jucks (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt): specialist terms in expert-lay interaction and collaborative learning dyads.