Fate O'Gara
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Email
fo18825@essex.ac.uk -
Location
Colchester Campus
Profile
- Situation Models, Mental Representations, Prediction
Qualifications
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BA (Hons) Linguistics Newcastle University (2011)
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MA Psycholinguistics University of Essex (2019)
Research and professional activities
Thesis
Event Numeration: On the Mechanics of Situation Model Construction
My thesis examines the role of two grammatical features on the construction of the mental representations of the situations described in texts: verbal negation and plurality denoting expressions. I investigate how people determine whether something happens within a situation, and, if something does happen, how many things are conceived to have happened. This work is expected to contribute to our growing knowledge of the mechanisms involved in the construction of mental representations.
Supervisor: Kyle Jerro , Laurel Lawyer
Research interests
Mental Representations
How comprehenders construct and use abstracted representations of linguistic data (and their interactions with non-linguistic knowledge and experience) at the levels of the word, sentence and, especially, at multi-sentential discourse structures.
Prediction
The expectations comprehenders hold about unfolding linguistic input during processing which can lead to good or poor integration with existing words and structures and context. This phenomenon is typically observable via experimental methods such as EEG.