Discourse Processing

Over the last decades psycholinguists have converged on a generally accepted framework for describing how humans process language at the sentence level. Much less is understood, however, about processing at the discourse level, where multiple sentences are understood to form a coherent whole. In this course we take an in-depth look at the question of discourse processing. We begin with a review of early models of discourse and narrative structure, turning next to findings from the sentence processing literature which implicate discourse structure. We consider both behavioral and neuro-imaging data in a critical analysis of past and current theories.