Dr. Zhenguang Cai from theInstituteofCognitionand theSchoolofPsychology, theUniversityofPlymouthpresented his recent works on April 19, 2013.His talk mainly focused on mental representations and processes for language comprehension and production. He first illustrated specific details for structure priming and discussed possible interpretations for it. Then he reported his recent studies on verb-phrase ellipsis, missing arguments and bilingual lexico-syntactic organizations. He found that the lexical representations in Chinese-Cantonese speakers were isolated, unlike their grammatical rules in the two languages. Finally, Dr. Cai pointed out that embodied semantics is a very promising field and the study of Chinese will make a great contribution to the knowledge of language processing, considering our current understanding is mainly based on literature of alphabetic languages, such as English.

Dr. Cai was a former labmate of Guangwai Brain and Language Lab. After he got his Master degree at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, he continued Ph.D research atUniversityofEdinburgh. Upon graduation, he worked as a research associate for the Embodied Cognition Lab atUniversityofManchesterbefore moving toUniversityofPlymouth.