Understanding spoken or written language requires the rapid, incremental processing of novel compositional structures, as well as the integration of the incoming language stream with multiple sources of information, such as the prior discourse, physical context, social information, etc. How are humans able to efficiently accomplish this task? To address this question, this course will consider principles of sentence and discourse processing that guide language understanding and features of sentence & discourse structure that facilitate comprehension. Specific topics are likely to include reference processing, memory & forgetting, individual differences in comprehension ability, the role of context, and computational models of language comprehension.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the term you will:
(i) have an overview of existing models of parsing and current issues in sentence processing research,
(ii) be able to understand and assess current scientific debates in this area,
(iii) understand and appreciate the relationship between syntactic theory and sentence processing.
- Module Supervisor: Claire Delle Luche