Research in sentence comprehension attempts to discover what representations are used when people understand sentences, and how these representations are arrived at during the course of understanding a sentence. Recent results have suggested that constructing an interpretation for a sentence involves the moment-by-moment integration of a variety of different information sources, such as the lexicon, syntax, plausibility and context. These information sources interact with the available computational resources to provide constraints on the permissible interpretation(s) for a string of incoming words in determining the final interpretation. In this course we will survey current evidence for some of these constraints and we will discuss recently proposed sentence comprehension models.
10% for discussion in class
30% for three 3 page papers
10% for a problem set
50% for a final project / paper
Details of the following assignments can be found in the assignments section.
Language Processing: Sentence Comprehension
Assignment 1: Three 3-page Papers
Assignment 2: Problem Set
Assignment 3: Final Project / Paper
Problem: Designing a Sentence Processing Experiment