The 2026 Dr. Donald G. Doehring Memorial Lecture

Thursday March 12 2026 • 4:30pm to 6pm
Dentistry Suite #102, 2001 Avenue McGill College

Anna Papafragou, PhD
Professor • Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania

Speaker Bio:
Anna Papafragou is Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania and Associate Director for Research at Penn's Mind Center for Outreach, Research, and Education (MindCORE). Her research focuses on how children acquire meaning in language, how language is used and understood, and how language interfaces with human perception and cognition. Papafragou has published widely on experimental semantics and pragmatics, language acquisition, and the relationship between language and thought. She has served as President of the Cognitive Science Society and is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.

Presentation title
Dynamic Events in Mind and Language

Brief description of presentation
Humans are surprisingly adept at interpreting what is happening around them and organizing this information in terms of dynamic events. Furthermore, across human communities, language is used to describe events. But what, exactly, is an event? In this talk, I propose a theory of eventhood that combines insights from philosophical analysis, cognitive psychology and linguistic theory. This theory integrates a large set of findings on how people represent, remember and talk about what happens.