Sentence comprehension (9 hours)

↵ Back to class homepage

Module overview

The goal of this module is for you to get familiar with basic concepts and methods for researching how people understand sentences. By the end of the module, hopefully you will be able to do the following things:

• Explain what self-paced reading is for and how it works;
• Explain what incrementality, interactivity, and accuracy mean with respect to sentence processing;
• Describe experiments testing each of the above concepts.

Module instructions

This module includes five tasks. For each task, you will need to read something and then answer some questions; some of these questions may require a long time to think about. You should do the tasks in the order they are presented here, because each task builds off of the previous one.

Next to the first three tasks I have written an estimate of how much time you might need to complete the task. This is, of course, a rough estimate, and the real time may be different for different students.

Module activities

1. Experiment on yourself (1 hour) [Complete before class]
2. Reflection on the experiment (1.5 hours) [Complete before class]
3. The garden path effect and incrementality (0.5 hours) [Complete before class]
4. Interactivity vs. autonomy
5. Grammatical accuracy

by Eric Pelzl, modified from content created by Stephen Politzer-Ahles. Last modified on 2024-02-22. CC-BY-4.0.