Language Processing
A graduate seminar from MIT examining how humans understand language in real time. The course surveys models of sentence and discourse comprehension drawn from linguistics, psychology, and artificial intelligence, including both symbolic and connectionist approaches. Topics covered include ambiguity resolution, linguistic complexity, and how lexical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, contextual, and prosodic cues combine during comprehension. The seminar also examines the relationship between working memory resources and language processing mechanisms, and asks whether linguistic representations proposed by theory have genuine psychological reality. Materials are provided through MIT OpenCourseWare under a Creative Commons license, including readings and seminar structure, though this is a discussion-based course rather than a lecture series with assignments. It suits students already familiar with linguistics or cognitive science who want to weigh competing computational models of comprehension against each other.