Event Segmentation

To manage the onslaught of continuously unfolding information in our complex environments, we adults are known to carve up our continuous experience into meaningful events, a process referred to as event segmentation. This segmentation directly shapes how our everyday experiences are construed: content experienced within an event is held mentally in an accessible state, which is then dropped after an event boundary. The greater accessibility of event-specific information has been shown to influence-at its most basic level-how information is processed and remembered. However, it is as yet unknown if accessibility is similarly influenced by event boundaries in children, who are still developing the working memory capacity and semantic knowledge thought to support event segmentation. Here, we tested seven-to nine-year-old children's and adults' recognition of objects experienced either within or across event boundaries of two cartoons. We found that children and adults were both more accurate and faster to correctly recognize objects that last occurred within events versus across event boundaries. We, however, additionally observed an interaction such that children's access to recent experience was less influenced by event boundaries than adults'. Thus, while the spontaneous segmentation of complex events emerges by middle childhood, event structure shapes the active contents of children's minds less reliably than adults'.

Questions of agency are central for understanding ritual behavior in general and representations of ritual efficacy in particular. Religious traditions often stipulate who are entitled to perform particular rituals. Further, representations of unobservable superhuman agents are often explicitly described as the 'real' ritual agents. Recent investigations into the processes underlying action representations and social cognition can help explain how these representations arise. It is argued that paying close attention to details in the cognitive processing of ordinary actions can shed light on how ritual actions activate part of these systems while simultaneously leaving other aspects unaccounted for. Th is has particular effects that make culturally transmitted representations of superhuman agents highly relevant.

Abstract
In this paper we analyze, from a ragmatic-semantic perspective, the interaction between the  speakers’ selection of  the lexical aspect (Aktionsart) and grammatical aspect to express their temporal representation of the events observed in a sequence of videos. Our study draws on the assumptions that speakers’ choices are the result of a “thinking for speaking” process (Slobin 1997, 2003:167), and that their organization of perceptions follows a hierarchical order, as proposed by Zack in his Theory of Event Segmentation (Zacks 2001, 2007; Tversky et al 2008). We also follow París’ pragmatic-semantic approach (París 2007), assuming that the lexical aspect or Artionsarten is determined by the intrinsic semantic properties of each verb prior to any compositional analysis, and it is part of the Lexical Semantic Representation (LSR) of the verb (Verkuyl 1993, Krifka 1998, París 2007). In contrast, grammatical aspect expresses time in terms of (im)perfect intervals. Both aspectual systems interact , yielding a complex system of temporal notions encoded in the Spanish language. Our hypotheses were that the speakers’ decisions on the use of (im)perfect, progressive or preterite morphosyntactic markings to express temporal notions depend on two main features: the dynamics of the event itself, and the speakers’ perception of the event as a bounded or unbounded episode. The results showed that perception and verbalization are  distinct instances  in which the epistemic distance is determined by: 1) the experiencer, 2) the inmediacy of the experience itself and 3)  the properties of the perceived object. Aspectual markings present variations according to the epistemic distance the speakers’ choose to express.
Key words: cognition, event segmentation,  grammatical aspect, Aktionsart, narrative.

In this article, I will consider the specificity of narrative in VR from the perspective of its embodied, spatial, and participatory nature. For this purpose, I will look at storytelling in VR from a neurofilmological perspective that accounts for both the cognitive and phenomenological and conceptualizes the viewer as an organism, applying an integrative view. I will probe several ideas from cognitive sciences and phenomenological cinema and media studies in order to support the above understanding of narrative in VR. I will apply these theories and ideas to specific VR case studies: Book of Distance (Randall Okita, 2019), Heterotopias (Noa Kaplan and Szilvia Ruszev, 2018), and Carne y Arena (Alejandro Iñárritu, 2017). Finally, this article will discuss the terms “ambient storytelling” (Stein and Fisher 2013), “somatic montage” (Waite 2016), and “embodied narrative” (a term used in cognitive sciences) and their relevance concerning narrative in VR.

We examine universals and crosslinguistic variation in constraints on event segmentation. Previ-ous typological studies have focused on segmentation into syntactic (Pawley 1987) or intonational units (Givón 1991). We argue that the correlation between such units and semantic/conceptual event representations is language-specific. As an alternative, we introduce the ‘macro-event prop-erty ’ (MEP): a construction has the MEP if it packages event representations such that temporal operators necessarily have scope over all subevents. A case study on the segmentation of motion events into macro-event expressions in eighteen genetically and typologically diverse languages has produced evidence of two types of design principles that impact motion-event segmentation: language-specific lexicalization patterns and universal constraints on form-to-meaning mapping.* 1. TOWARD A SEMANTIC TYPOLOGY OF MOTION-EVENT SEGMENTATION. SEMANTIC TY-POLOGY is the comparative study of linguistic categorizati...

Lo spettatore di un film o di una serie tv tende a segmentare gli eventi narrativi in base a un “montaggio mentale” che non necessariamente corrisponde al montaggio audiovisivo. L’analisi di due episodi stilisticamente opposti della serie televisiva "True Detective" rivela la tendenza naturale dello spettatore a compensare – direttamente o inversamente – l’intensità del montaggio al fine di assicurare la comprensione narrativa. Al contempo l’analisi fa emergere la necessità di integrare alla Event Segmentation Theory un approccio “enattivo” che la natura incorporata del montaggio e la matrice corporea dell’esperienza filmica.

The film or TV series spectator tends to segment the narrative events on the basis of a “mental montage” that does not necessarily correspond to the audiovisual editing. The analysis of two (stylistically opposite) episodes of "True Detective" reveals the spectator’s natural tendency to compensate – directly or inversely – the intensity of audiovisual editing for the purpose of narrative understanding. At the same time, the analysis highlights the need to integrate an “enactive” approach to the Event Segmentation Theory – one that enhances the bodily nature of the filmic experience the embodied nature of audiovisual editing.

We examine universals and crosslinguistic variation in constraints on event segmentation. Previous typological studies have focused on segmentation into syntactic or intonational units (Givón 1991). We argue that the correlation between such units and semantic/conceptual event representations is language-specific. As an alternative, we introduce the 'macro-event property' (MEP): a construction has the MEP if it packages event representations such that temporal operators necessarily have scope over all subevents. A case study on the segmentation of motion events into macro-event expressions in eighteen genetically and typologically diverse languages has produced evidence of two types of design principles that impact motion-event segmentation: language-specific lexicalization patterns and universal constraints on form-to-meaning mapping.*

The interaction between language and perception networks in the brain can hold the key to the
biological bases of language evolution. In language, every sentence is built around a verb, which
describes an event. During perception, humans constantly and automatically segment reality into
individualized event (verb) units. The cognitive connection between the perceptual segmentation
of events and their grammatical expression in language is a novel direction for research into the
neurobiology of language, but it may be a key example of the emergence of linguistic structure –
grammatical category – from individualized meaning.
This article summarizes the current state of this research, and is divided into three parts. The initial
overview of cross-linguistic typology of events shows that events and their boundaries are of vital
importance to linguistic communication. We then summarize what is known about perceiving and
identifying event boundaries in the most well-studied domain, that of visual perception. Here, sign
languages provide the link between visual perception and linguistic expression, showing a complex
mapping from perceptual and cognitive event segmentation to linguistic structures at the phonology–
syntax interface. The last section reviews current evidence for neural bases of event processing, showing
that identification of an event boundary (linguistic or perceptual) is used for memory updates, and
suggesting the possible role of an event-type universal in the syntactic structure of human languages.

In this paper we analyze, from a pragmatic-semantic perspective, the interaction between the  speakers’ selection of  the lexical aspect (Aktionsart) and grammatical aspect to express their temporal representation of the events observed in a sequence of videos. Our study draws on the assumptions that speakers’ choices are the result of a “thinking for speaking” process (Slobin 1997, 2003:167), and that their organization of perceptions follows a hierarchical order, as proposed by Zack in his Theory of Event Segmentation (Zacks 2001, 2007; Tversky et al 2008). We also follow París’ pragmatic-semantic approach (París 2007), assuming that the lexical aspect or Artionsart is determined by the intrinsic semantic properties of each verb prior to any compositional analysis, and it is part of the Lexical Semantic Representation (LSR) of the verb (Verkuyl 1993, Krifka 1998, París 2007). In contrast, grammatical aspect expresses time in terms of (im)perfect intervals. Both aspectual systems interact, yielding a complex system of temporal notions encoded in the Spanish language. Our hypotheses were that the speakers’ decisions on the use of (im)perfect, progressive or preterite morphosyntactic markings to express temporal notions depend on two main features: the dynamics of the event itself, and the speakers’ perception of the event as a bounded or unbounded episode. The results showed that perception and verbalization are  distinct instances  in which the epistemic distance is determined by: 1) the experiencer, 2) the inmediacy of the experience itself and 3)  the properties of the perceived object. Aspectual markings present variations according to the epistemic distance the speakers’ choose to express.