SSHRC
2006-2009

Linguistic structural complexity and the nature of conceptual representation

de Almeida, R. G. (Concordia University)

The main goal of this project is to address the debate between decompositional and atomic theories of conceptual representation focusing on the nature of the mental representation of verbs. This dispute is central not only to linguistic and psycholinguistic theories of language representation and processing but also to the foundations of cognitive science--for concepts are the very elements that constitute our vocabulary of higher cognitive representations. The focus of this project will be on concepts that are labeled by monomorphemic (e.g., kill) and multimorphemic (e.g., darken) causative verbs. The project will employ diverse experimental techniques in psycholinguistic experiments manipulating morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties of these verbs.