Natural language research announcements

[Margaret Fleck <mfleck AT cs.uiuc.edu>]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Psycholinguistic seminar announcement
Date: Thu, 3 Dec 2009 11:00:13 -0600
From: Jennifer Cole 
<jscole AT ILLINOIS.EDU>
Reply-To: Cole, Jennifer S 
<jscole AT illinois.edu>
To: 
LING-GRAD-L AT LISTSERV.ILLINOIS.EDU
 
<LING-GRAD-L AT LISTSERV.ILLINOIS.EDU>

From: Cynthia Fisher 
[mailto:cfisher AT cyrus.psych.uiuc.edu<mailto:cfisher AT cyrus.psych.uiuc.edu>]
Sent: Thursday, December 03, 2009 10:31 AM


Here is a description of a graduate seminar I am offering in the
spring. Please let me know if you have any questions -- I hope you'll
be interested!
cheers,
CF


----------------------------------------------------


Psych 593CF

Spring 2010

Special topics in language acquisition:  The development of the
sentence comprehension system

Instructor: Cynthia Fisher

Meeting time: W 3:30-5:30, Room 815 Psychology

Topic Description:

In the first few years of life, children learn thousands of words, and
also work out the structure of their language at multiple levels of
analysis (e.g., phonological, semantic, syntactic). At the same time,
they develop an efficient system for understanding sentences online.
The adult comprehension system has two fundamental properties: (1)
Sentence comprehension is incremental: Listeners interpret each part
of a sentence as it unfolds in time, not waiting until the sentence is
complete to start computing meaning. (2) Sentence comprehension is
influenced by multiple information sources, including the referential
context, the discourse context, word-specific as well as abstract
syntactic information, and prosody. In this seminar we will read and
discuss current literature that addresses the development of these two
fundamental properties of language comprehension. We will read key
papers in the adult psycholinguistics literature, but focus on the
emerging developmental literature on these topics. How much we read
about particular sub-topics (e.g., verb bias effects, online
adaptation to the speaker's knowledge, the sources of individual
differences in online sentence comprehension, prosodic effects) can be
adjusted to suit the interests of the seminar group.



--------------------
Cynthia Fisher
Psychology Department
University of Illinois
Champaign, IL 61820
phone: 217-333-3545
fax: 217-244-5876
clfishe AT illinois.edu<mailto:clfishe AT illinois.edu>