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2016/02/23

BLIT Colloquium with Mikihiro Tanaka

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

ContactSakai Lab, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Waseda University