NEWS
2024
August – Congratulations to Claudia Raihert for being awarded the Ontario Graduate Scholarship for her work on the early acquisition of metaphor comprehension skills!
July – Our lab is well-represented at the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Dr. Grigoroglou is presenting a poster titled "Logical Language and the Development of Reasoning by the Disjunctive Syllogism," co-authored with S. Hackeek and P. Ganea. PhD student Claudia Raihert will showcase a poster titled "Metaphor Comprehension in Preschoolers: A Pragmatic Skill." Additionally, PhD student Christiana Moser will deliver a talk on "Multimodal Description of Instrument Events in Turkish and English," co-authored with B. Tarakcı, E. Ünal & M. Grigoroglou.
June – Christiana Moser gave a talk entitled "Multimodal Recipient Mentions in Possession-Transfer Event Descriptions: Language Specificity Outweighs Conceptual Peripherality" at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association held at Carleton University, Ontario (co-authored with B. Tarakcı, E. Ünal & Grigoroglou, M).
June – Christiana Moser presented a poster titled "Conceptual and Language-Specific Effects on Multimodal Recipient Event Descriptions" at the Experiments in Linguistic Meaning conference at the University of Pennsylvania (co-authored with B. Tarakcı, E. Ünal & Grigoroglou, M).
April – At the first University of Toronto Language Acquisition Workshop, our lab presented two talks. Christiana Moser delivered a talk titled "Conceptual and language-specific effects on multimodal event descriptions by children and adults", co-authored with B. Tarakcı, E. Ünal & M. Grigoroglou. Amina Shmanova presented a talk titled "How do young children interpret conditionals?", co-authored with M. Grigoroglou and P. Ganea.
March – Congratulations to our Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program students, Mishaal Kandapath and Sophia Joulaei, on their poster presentations. Mishaal presented a poster titled "Cross-linguistic Differences in Possession Transfer Event Descriptions in Turkish and English," co-authored with C. Moser and M. Grigoroglou. Sophia presented a poster titled "Metaphor Comprehension in Young Children," co-authored with C. Raihert and M. Grigoroglou.
January – Christiana Moser delivered a talk at the 99th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in New York. The talk was titled "Conceptual and language-specific syntactic influences on the description of instrument events in Turkish and English" (co-authored with B. Tarakcı, E. Ünal & Grigoroglou, M)
2023
November – Dr. Grigoroglou presented a poster, "Pragmatic effects in conditional reasoning: The role of alternatives", at the 48th Boston University Conference on Language Development (co-authored with A. Shmanova & P. Ganea).
September – Dr. Grigoroglou gave a talk entitled "The role of alternatives in conditional reasoning" at The Tenth Biennial Meeting of Experimental Pragmatics in Paris, France. The talk was co-authored with A. Shmanova and P. Ganea.
July – The lab's research was well-represented at the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society in Sydney, Australia. Dr. Grigoroglou gave a talk titled "The ins and outs of spatial language" (co-authored with A. Papagragou and B. Landau). The talk was part of the "Space in Context: Communicative factors shape spatial language" symposium co-organized by M. Grigoroglou and A. Papafragou. Additionally, Christiana Moser presented a poster at the same meeting on the topic of "A cross-linguistic investigation of possession-transfer and instrument events in language production" (co-authored with Tarakcı, B., Ünal, E., and Grigoroglou, M).
June – Warm congratulations to our lab members Amina Shmanova, Bianca Yuen, and Shen Hu for successfully completing their bachelor's degrees! We'll certainly miss you all!
March – Dr. Grigoroglou gave a talk titled "Conceptual and psycholinguistic factors in the acquisition of conditionals" (co-authored with P. Ganea) at the Society for Research on Child Development (SRCD). The talk was part of the symposium "How do children reason about hypothetical possibilities? Evidence from language production", chaired by M. Grigoroglou.
March – ROP students Rio Tang and Tony Jintao Hu presented their research at the Research Opportunities Program Poster Fair. Rio presented a poster titled "Did Rose Really Sink?: Metaphor Comprehension in Children" at the program poster fair (co-authored with C. Raihert & M. Grigoroglou), and Tony presented a poster titled "A cross-linguistic investigation of possession-transfer and instrument events in language production."
March – Research Opportunity Program student, Tony Jintao Hu, gave a talk at the 16th Toronto Undergraduate Linguistics Conference (TULCON), titled "A cross-linguistic investigation of possession-transfer and instrument events in language production" (co-authored with C. Moser & M. Grigoroglou).
February – Dr. Grigoroglou gave a talk at the University of Calgary titled "Pragmatic pressures on spatial language acquisition and use".
February – Amina Shmanova gave a talk at the 4th Toronto Undergraduate Cognitive Science Research Conference (Confluence), titled "How Do Young Children Interpret Conditionals?" (co-authored with P. Ganea & M. Grigoroglou).
January – Dr. Grigoroglou presented a poster titled "On the late acquisition of conditionals: conceptual vs. psycholinguistic explanations" at the Budapest CEU Conference on Cognitive Development (co-authored with P. Ganea).
2022
November – The lab’s research is well represented at the 47th Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD; November 3 – 6). Dr. Grigoroglou is giving a talk titled “How do children interpret the meaning of conditional statements?” and is also presenting a poster titled “Revisiting the acquisition of conditionals in early language production” (both co-authored with P. Ganea).
July – Amina Shmanova presented her research at the 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci; July 27 – 30). Amina presented a poster titled “How do young children interpret conditionals?” (co-authored with M. Grigoroglou & P. Ganea).
March – ROP students Amina Shmanova and Bianca Yuen presented their research at the Research Opportunities Program Poster Fair. Amina presented a poster titled “How do young children interpret conditionals?” and Bianca a poster titled “Speech and gesture in event descriptions: A cross-linguistic comparison of English & Turkish”.
February – Dr. Grigoroglou gave an invited talk titled “Communicative pressures on spatial language acquisition and use” at UTism, the annual conference organized by the Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence Students Association (CASA) of the University of Toronto.
February – Dr. Grigoroglou gave this year’s Academic seminar of the Society of Linguistics Undergraduate Students (SLUGS). The seminar was titled “Audience Design in Children”.
January – Dr. Grigoroglou gave a talk at the virtual Budapest CEU Conference on Cognitive Development (BCCCD; January 10-14). The talk is titled “The development of conditional meaning” (co-authored with P. Ganea).
2021
November – The lab’s work was presented at the virtual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD; November 4-7). Myrto presented two posters titled "A cross-linguistic bias in motion path encoding" (co-authored with M. Johanson & A. Papafragou) and “The early meaning of conditionals” (co-authored with P. Ganea).
October – Dr. Myrto Grigoroglou and Dr. Ercenur Ünal (Özyeğin University) received SSHRC Insight Development Grant: “Crosslinguistic investigation of events in speech and gesture”.
July – Dr. Grigoroglou was awarded a Connaught New Researcher Award on “Constructing common ground in speech and gesture”.
June – Dr. Grigoroglou presented her work at the Conference on Mutual Knowledge (MK40) organized by the Linguistics Dept at UCL. Myrto gave a talk titled "Speaker adjustments to addressees during language production", co-authored with Anna Papafragou.
March – Dr. Grigoroglou gave an interview to the Arts and Science News about her research and how children acquire language. The interview was part of the College’s celebration of International Women’s Day on March 8 by highlighting the groundbreaking contributions and unique stories of A&S women.