Sentence and Discourse Processing

Time and Location

Monday Periods 6-8, Anderson 13

Course Description

Within psycholinguistics, there is a particular interest in how people process sentences both in their own right and when they part of a larger discourse. Processing and comprehending sentences involves the coordination of many levels of linguistic representation and engages with other cognitive systems including memory and attention. This course focuses on four central areas within sentence and discourse processing:

• Unbounded dependencies – Who is Sherlock searching for ____ ?

How are wh-words and other displaced elements in a sentence linked correctly in order to understand sentences that involve wh-questions and relative clauses?

• Information structure – It’s Watson that Sherlock’s trying to find.

How do information statuses like focus and topic influence processing and attention?

• Coreference – I don’t know if he’ll find him in time.

How do recognize and interpret when referents are (re)referred to?

• Dialogue & Alignment – I think he might!

How do speakers unconsciously influence each other during dialogue and what does this mean for language processing?