Descripción y contextualización de la asignatura

Theories of language and discourse comprehension; Neurocognitive models; Methodological approaches; Sentence and discourse production

Temario

Based on subjective experience, understanding sentences is typically an automatic and mostly effortless process. However, psycholinguistic research in the last 20 years has shown that various factors have an impact in the rapidity and easiness with which we analyze and interpret sentences.

Throughout the course, students will learn about the cognitive processes that enable the comprehension of both sentences and discourse, their neural basis, and state-of-the-art techniques for studying this level of linguistic complexity. They will be equipped with tools to evaluate and conduct primary research on sentence processing critically and independently.

The course is divided in two complementary parts:

The first part aims to contextualize sentence processing. In naturalistic situations, sentence comprehension depends not only on the linguistic message but also on the visual input received from the speaker (e.g. body gestures and facial movements), the situational context, or the listener’s expectations. Therefore, sentence comprehension is typically an audiovisual communicative process. To gain a better understanding of this complex ability, the neurophysiological processes that make sentence comprehension possible will be framed within its natural social context. The following topics will be covered: the evolutionary basis of sentence comprehension, socially-situated language comprehension, multimodal language comprehension, and naturalistic language comprehension.

In the second part of the course, the students will be provided an advanced understanding of human sentence processing looking at the different aspects that come into play during their parsing: syntactic and semantic-discourse analysis, but also ambiguity and the resolution of local and long-distance relationships. To this end, the discussion of the neurobiological foundations of sentence processing and related findings will be preceded by an introduction to basic syntax concepts. Methodological and theoretical issues will be considered alongside each other. Neurophysiological correlates of semantic and syntactic violations within a sentence context will be presented and their theoretical implications will be discussed

Bibliografía

Materiales de uso obligatorio

There is no textbook for this class, a list of readings selected from scholarly articles and book chapters will be provided at the beginning of the course.

Bibliografía básica

Altmann, G.T.M. (1998). Ambiguity in sentence processing. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2(4), 1-7.

Altmann, G.T.M., & Kamide, Y. (1999). Incremental interpretation at verbs: Restricting the domain of subsequent reference. Cognition, 73, 247-264.

Bock, K. (1996). Language production: Methods and methodologies. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 3(4), 395-421.

Bock, K., & Levelt, W. (1994). Language Production: Grammatical encoding. In M.A. Gernsbacher (Ed.), Handbook of psycholinguistics, Academic Press, pp. 945 - 984.

Bornkessel, Ina & Matthias Schlesewsky (2006), The extended argument dependency model: A neurocognitive approach to sentence comprehension across languages, Psychological Review 113:787{821.

Farmer, T. A., Christiansen, M. H., & Monaghan, P. (2006). Phonological typicality influences on-line sentence comprehension. Proc. National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 103, 12203-12208.

Ferreira, V. S. (2008). Ambiguity, accessibility, and a division of labor for communicative success. Psychology of Learning and Motivation.

Fodor, J. D., & Ferreira, F. (1998). Reanalysis in sentence processing. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer.

Frazier, L. & Clifton, Jr., C. (1996). Construal. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Friederici, A. D. (2002). Toward a neural basis of auditory sentence processing. Trends in cognitive Sciences, 6, 78-84

Gibson, E. (2000). The dependency-locality theory: A distance-based theory of linguistic complexity. In Miyashita, I., Marantz, A., & O¿Neil, W. (Eds.), Image, language, brain: Papers from the first mind articulation symposium (pp. 94-126). Cambridge, MA, USA: The MIT Press.

Gordon, P. C., Hendrick, R., & Levine, W.H. (2002). Memory-load interference in syntactic processing. Psychological Science, 13, 425-430.

Grodner, D., & Gibson, E. (2005). Consequences of the serial nature of linguistic input for sentential complexity. Cognitive Science, 29, 261-290.