Master of Science / Department of Psychological Sciences / Heather R. Bailey / Much research has shown that experts possess superior memory in their field of expertise. This memory benefit has been proposed to be the result of various encoding mechanisms, such as chunking and differentiation. Another potential encoding mechanism that is associated with memory is event segmentation, which is the process by which individuals parse continuous information into meaningful, discrete units. Event Segmentation Theory proposes that segmentation is influenced by perceptual (e.g., motion) and conceptual (e.g. semantic knowledge) cues. Previous research has found evidence supporting the influence of knowledge on segmentation, specifically through the manipulation of goals and familiarity for everyday activities. To date, few studies have investigated the influence of expertise on segmentation, and questions about expertise, segmentation ability, and their impact on memory still remain. The goal of the current study was to investigate the influence of expertise on segmentation and memory ability for two different domains: basketball and Overwatch. Participants with high and low knowledge for basketball viewed and segmented basketball and Overwatch videos at coarse and fine grains, then completed memory tests. Differences in segmentation ability and memory were present between experts and novices, specifically for the basketball videos; however, segmentation only predicted memory for activities for which knowledge was lacking, for experts. Overall, this research suggests that experts’ superior memory is not due to their segmentation ability and contributes to a growing body of literature showing evidence supporting conceptual effects on segmentation.

This dissertation is an investigation of serial verb constructions in Lao (Tai-Kadai, SVO) and the events that they encode. Serial verb constructions (SVCs), structures where multiple verbs appear in a single clause, raise several important questions for syntactic theory. One issue is how the verbs are related; proposals involving coordination (Payne 1985), subordination (Collins 1997), and adjunction (Hale 1991; Muansuwan 2002) have all been made, while others have made a case for unorthodox double-headed structures (Baker & Stewart 2002; Baker 1989). Additionally, the argument sharing seen in SVCs is seemingly incompatible with proposed constraints on theta-role assignment, such as the Theta-Criterion (Chomsky 1981) or the Biuniqueness Condition (Bresnan 1980). In this thesis I describe new data from the Lao language focusing on two subtypes of SVC that Stewart (1998) calls consequential SVCs (CSVCs) and resultative SVCs (RSVCs). I propose a generative analysis of these structures where an event head licenses a complex VP containing multiple verbs where the object is thematically related to the complex VP rather than the individual predicates. Evidence for the event head comes from a modified version of the explicit segmentation task (Zacks et al. 2001). During the experiment, participants were instructed to divide video clips into events. When participants saw a CSVC before the video, they divided the action sequence depicted by the CSVC into fewer events than when participants saw a coordinated construction before the video. These results suggest that seeing the SVC prompted the participants to group the target sequence of events in the videos together as a larger macro-event, supporting the claim that SVCs encode a single event (contra Foley 2010). These data also support the proposal that events are conceptualized at the clausal level, rather than at the verbal level, which is in line with proposals from Evans (2010), Jackendoff (1991), and Pustejovsky (1991).

Master of Science / Department of Psychological Sciences / Lester Loschky / Film is a ubiquitous medium. However, the process by which we comprehend film narratives is not well understood. Reading research has shown a strong connection between eye-movements and comprehension. In four experiments we tested whether the eye-movement and comprehension relationship held for films. This was done by manipulating viewer comprehension by starting participants at different points in a film, and then tracking their eyes. Overall, the manipulation created large differences in comprehension, but only found small difference in eye-movements. In a condition of the final experiment, a task manipulation was designed to prioritize different stimulus features. This task manipulation created large differences in eye-movements when compared to participants freely viewing the clip. These results indicate that with the implicit task of narrative comprehension, top-down comprehension processes have little effect on eye-movements. To allow for strong, volitional top-down control of eye-movements in film, task manipulations need to make features that are important to comprehension irrelevant to the task.

Segmenting our ongoing experience into events is a fundamental aspect of human cognition and memory. Prior work in adults has shown that we naturally and spontaneously parse our experience along event boundaries, both behaviorally and neurally, and that this is reflected in event memory as well. With this project, we aimed to examine whether children ages 4-7 also spontaneously track events while encoding naturalistic stimuli, whether they can behaviorally demarcate event boundaries, and how this influences their memory for events. Our results indicate that children can segment naturalistic stimuli into events like adults, but they do so with more variability, and their boundaries differ from adults’ boundaries in terms of both location and consistency. Children’s behaviorally- delineated boundaries were also reflected in a separate group of children’s neural data, when examined both from a hypothesis driven and a data driven approach, indicating that young children’s brains track events during perception. Last, we found that children’s event segmentation grows more adult-like across early childhood, and that children who segment events more like adults may have better memory for those events. Overall, this study suggests that children’s event cognition and memory is robust even at very young ages, but that it is still developing across early childhood and becomes more adult-like as children age. / Psychology

Mluvčí typologicky odlišných jazyků volí různé strategie při popisu stejné události v závislosti na dostupných jazykově-specifických gramatických prostředcích. Tyto strategie se projevují např. různými způsoby konceptualizace událostních rámců bě- hem jazykového vyjádření, ale v nejazykové kognici. Jedním z jevů, které byly v této souvislosti zaznemány, jsou jazykově specifické způsoby gestikulace doprovázející mluvené popisy událostí, které reflektují (či manifestují) tělesně ukotvená konceptuál- ní schémata, na nichž naše vnímání událostí stojí. Tématem této práce je multimodální konstruování (construal) událostí v češtině a v angličtině. Konkrétně se práce zaměřuje na spojitosti mezi formálními rysy gest (způsob pohybu a jeho zakončení) a sémantické rysy, které konstituují tzv. aspektuální kontury událostí (konstruování časového a kvalitativního průběhu události). První část prezentovaného výzkumu tvoří analýza materiálu z českého a anglického multimodální korpusu. Oba použité korpusy obsahují nahrávky spontánních pro- jevů v interakcích zachycených během pracovních jednání v akademickém prostředí. Kvantitativní analýzy (metoda tzv. klasifikačních stromů a náhodných lesů) ukázala, že a) v angličtině je významným prediktorem výskytu gest s rysem ukončenosti aktion- sartová kategorie achievement...