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<span style="font-size: 18pt;">The Department of Cognitive Science</span></p>
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<span style="font-size: 18pt;">cordially invites you to the public defense of the PhD thesis</span></p>
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<span style="font-size: 18pt;"><b>INFERRING TEMPORAL ORDER</b></span></p>
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<span style="font-size: 18pt;"><b>IN LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION</b></span></p>
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<span style="font-size: 18pt;">by</span></p>
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<span style="font-size: 18pt;"> </span></p>
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<span style="font-size: 18pt;">Elena Marx</span></p>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -0.25pt; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 15pt; text-transform: uppercase;"><b>Tuesday,</b> January 13</span><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT; font-size: 16.5pt;">,</span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.25pt; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 15pt; text-transform: uppercase;"><b> 3 P.M.</b> CET</span></p>
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<b>QS Auditorium</b> <b>(CEU, Quellenstrasse 51, 1100 Vienna)</b></p>
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Zoom: <span style="color: rgb(70, 120, 134);"><u><a href="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/97449457820?pwd%3DMKOSvQ2ATdtpwzVVSZSWDj0Iwab4ka.1&sa=D&source=calendar&usd=2&usg=AOvVaw2oGQ0_pl6q8JRYBfriF62q" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(70, 120, 134); margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;">https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/97449457820?pwd=MKOSvQ2ATdtpwzVVSZSWDj0Iwab4ka.1</a></u></span></p>
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Meeting ID: 974 4945 7820<br>
Passcode: 835739</p>
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<span style="font-family: NimbusRomNo9L-Regu;">PRIMARY SUPERVISOR: Éva Wittenberg (CEU)</span></p>
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<span style="font-family: NimbusRomNo9L-Regu;">SECONDARY SUPERVISOR: Ágnes Melinda Kovács (CEU)</span></p>
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<span style="font-family: NimbusRomNo9L-Regu;"><u>Members of the Dissertation Committee:</u></span></p>
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<span style="font-family: NimbusRomNo9L-Regu;"> Gergely Csibra, Chair, CEU</span></p>
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<span style="font-family: NimbusRomNo9L-Regu; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(78, 149, 217);"><u><a href="https://psychology.uconn.edu/person/gerry-altmann/" style="color: rgb(78, 149, 217); margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;">Gerry Altmann</a></u></span><span style="font-family: NimbusRomNo9L-Regu; font-size: 12pt;">,
University of Connecticut as External Examiner</span></p>
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<span style="font-family: NimbusRomNo9L-Regu; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(78, 149, 217);"><u><a href="https://www.mpi.nl/people/unal-ercenur" style="color: rgb(78, 149, 217); margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;">Ercenur Ünal</a></u></span><span style="font-family: NimbusRomNo9L-Regu; font-size: 12pt;">,
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics as External Examiner</span></p>
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<span style="font-size: 11.5pt; color: rgb(32, 31, 30);"><b>*</b></span><span style="font-family: NimbusRomNo9L-Regu; color: black;">Anyone not affiliated with CEU wishing to attend in-person in Vienna
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here</a></u></span><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; color: black;"> </span><span style="font-family: NimbusRomNo9L-Regu; color: black;">to get access to the lecture hall.</span></p>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.4pt; font-size: 14pt; text-transform: uppercase;"><b>ABSTRACT</b></span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.1pt; font-family: OpenSans-CondensedBold; font-size: 24pt; text-transform: uppercase;"><b> </b></span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.1pt; font-size: 14pt; color: rgb(0, 154, 199);"><b>|</b></span><span style="font-family: NimbusRomNo9L-Regu;">How
do people order events in their mind when listening to a story? Language often provides explicit hints as to whether something has happened, will happen or happened before or after something else. However, in many cases, the temporal order between linguistically
described situations is underspecified and needs to be inferred. This thesis proposes that such inferences are grounded in more general cognitive principles that take event dynamicity – namely, whether situations are inherently static or change over time –
as a starting point. Specifically, I propose that comprehenders infer more salient events to happen against the backdrop of less salient states.</span></p>
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<span style="font-family: NimbusRomNo9L-Regu;">Four lines of experiments serve to test this proposal experimentally. The first study provides first empirical evidence that temporal interpretation is systematically driven by encoded event dynamicity. Participants
reliably matched complex situation descriptions to visual sequences in which described states preceded described events. The second study replicates this pattern of results in three languages in an act-out task, demonstrating that this interpretative preference
arises in the absence of visual scaffolding. The third study extends the linguistic context under investigation from complex sentence descriptions to discourse. The fourth study delves deeper into the underlying mechanisms of this temporal inference by using
different tenses, thereby testing competing explanations based on linguistic encoding and more general cognitive principles.</span></p>
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<span style="font-family: NimbusRomNo9L-Regu; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Overall, this thesis sheds light on the broader question of how event cognition and language interact to form mental representations of temporal relations. Its findings support models of event
comprehension that treat event structure, more specifically the presence or absence of dynamic change, as a central organizing principle for understanding temporal structure in language.</span></p>
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<b>Hosted by the Department of Cognitive Science</b></p>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; color: rgb(31, 73, 125); line-height: 120%; text-transform: uppercase;">GyörgyNÉ Finta (Réka)</span></p>
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<span style="font-family: OpenSans-Extrabold; font-size: 10pt; color: rgb(31, 73, 125); line-height: 120%; text-transform: uppercase;">Department Coordinator</span></p>
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<span style="font-family: OpenSans-Extrabold; font-size: 10pt; color: rgb(31, 73, 125); line-height: 120%; text-transform: uppercase;">Department of cognitive SCience</span></p>
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