Rebecca Defina

I am a PhD student in the Categories across Language and Cognition project within the Language and Cognition department.
 
For the last 3 years I have been working on Avatime. Avatime is a Ghana-Togo Mountain language spoken by 10 000 - 20 000 people a little north of Ho in Ghana (see the fieldsite webpage for more information).

My PhD research focuses on event segmentation and serial verb constructions in Avatime. My aim is to find a relation between the way events are segmented in language and the way they are segmented in non-linguistic cognition. Towards this end I am comparing the linguistic and non-linguistic segmentation of events by Avatime and English speakers.