160051 PS Introductory Seminar on Cognitive Psychology for Linguists (2012S)

How do we construct syntactic structure from the words of the sentence? How do we assign meaning to these structures? The course will introduce modular and interactionist, constraint based, probabilistic and information-theoretical approaches to sentence comprehension, and the different roles these models assign to grammatical and non-grammatical factors like lexical and world knowledge, or discourse models. We will also try to relate these psycholinguistic models to evidence from imaging studies and neurobiological models of sentence comprehension. Special attention is going to be devoted to evidence from studies of different kinds of ambiguity. Garden path sentences and sentences containing homonyms allow us to examine whether we commit to one interpretation early on, and only fix mistakes later, or keep parallel options open until disambiguation is possible. Language comprehension also recruits numerous nonlinguistic abilities, but the specific role of these abilities in grammatical and semantic processing is not fully clear yet. We will also look into how individual differences in memory and inhibition are related to individual differences in language processing.