Psycholinguistics of Words, Sentences and Discourse

Carlos Acuña-Fariña, a linguist and a psycholinguist, is Professor of English Philology at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, Spain. His psycholinguistic research has used the methodologies of self-paced reading, eye-tracking and event-related potentials (ERPs). He is the author of Syntactic Processing: An Overview (2024).

• Acknowledgments1. Introduction1.1. Going to the moon or translating1.2. Clearing up three misunderstandings1.3. What and howReview questionsFurther questions2. Processing words2.1. Introduction; what's in a word?2.2. It is big and it moves fast, soooo fast...23. Accessing the lexicon: three problems2.4. Dealing with co-articulation2.5. Activation is not selection2.6. The words that meant too much2.7. Selection criteria in access2.8. The production of small words2.9. SummarizingReview questionsFurther questions 3. Processing sentences 3.1. Introduction: What is a grammar good for?3.2. The origin of sentence processing research3.3. The origin of modern sentence processing research3.4. The famous case of relative clauses after complex NPs3.4.1. Introduction: the Garden Path Model3.4.2. The Tuning model: the role of frequency in syntactic disambiguation3.4.3. Construal: because not all constituents are created equal3.4.4. The role of segmentation and prosody3.4.5. The role of lexical and sentential meaning and context: Satisfying multiple constraints3.4.6. The Unrestricted Race Model3.5. The processing of agreement3.5.1. Introduction3.5.2. The phenomenon of attraction in production3.5.3. Agreement in comprehension3.6. The 'empty categories'3.6.1. Introduction3.6.2. PRO and the grammar of control3.6.3. The Active Filler Strategy: traces3.6.4. Word order as a guide3.6.5. Summing up gaps (and, really, everything else …)3.7. Heuristics and good-enough, goal-directed, predictive processingReview questionsFurther questions4. Processing discourse 4.1. Discourse4.2. The human inferential capacity4.3. The memory of discourse4.4. Referential coherence4.5. Relational coherence (I)4.6. Relational coherence (II)4.7. Schemas and memory: computational economics that come at a priceReview questionsFurther questions 5. Epilogue: artificial intelligence and language5.1. Introduction5.2. Artificial intelligence and human language5.3. Artificial intelligence and 'sophisticated' syntaxReview questionsFurther questions Index