BLIT (Brain science of Language, Inference, and Thought research unit) Colloquium Series 2016
Date: February 25, 2016 (Thursday)
Time: 13:30-15:00
Venue: Meeting Room 12, 5th floor, Building 51, School of Science and Engineering, Waseda University (Nishi Waseda Campus: access)
Title: Planning association of causes and consequences in Japanese
Speaker: Mikihiro Tanaka (Konan Women’s University)
Abstract:
This study investigates how people use the causality information (e.g., cause and consequence) in Japanese, by examining the nature of participants’ continuations to discourse fragments in four experiments. Firstly, I found that people generally prefer to continue a discourse from the previous consequence, and this preference is moderated by a recency effect (Simner & Pickering, 2005; van den Broek et al., 2000). Secondly, I found the causal content of the continuation is influenced by the type of the previous context, and typicality of events. I suggest that people consider an absence of either cause or consequence to be a gap, and they seek to fill this gap in their narrative. Furthermore, people do not simply use causality relations to produce an utterance in their discourse; they use their world knowledge and features of textual and temporal recency to produce a successful narrative.
This colloquium is presented by BLIT and supported by CELESE (Center for English Language Education for Science and Engineering) at Waseda University
Contact: Sakai Lab, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Waseda University