9.59J / 24.905J Psycholinguistics, Fall 2002

Abstract

Central topics in language processing. The structure of language. Sentence processing. Discourse processing. Morphological processing. The storage and access of words in the mental dictionary. Speech processing. The relationship between the computational resources available in working memory and the language processing mechanism. Ambiguity resolution. Discussion of computational modeling, including connectionist models. The relationship between language and thought. Issues in language acquisition including critical period phenomena, the acquisition of speech, and the acquisition of words. Experimental methodologies such as self-paced reading, eye-tracking, cross-modal priming, and neural imaging methods. From the course home page: Highlights of this Course The ability to communicate arbitrary ideas through thin air via sound waves is a complex and fascinating process. In this course we will study how language is represented, processed and acquired, with a concentration on how language is comprehended in real time. Language is structured at many levels: sounds are structured into morphemes; morphemes are structured into words; words are structured into sentences; and sentences are structured into discourses. In this course, we will concentrate mostly on information processing above the word level. We will also discuss sound and word-level information processing, but to a lesser extent. Topics to be covered include: syntax; sentence comprehension; semantic, pragmatic and discourse comprehension; intonation; neural networks and language processing; neural imaging and language processing; language production; language acquisition; speech; speech comprehension; visual word recognition; and the relationship between language and thought.