Language Processing and Real-Time Sentence Comprehension

How does the human mind decode complex sentences, resolve linguistic ambiguity, and construct meaning in real time? Understanding the intersection of cognitive science, linguistics, and computation is essential for anyone interested in how natural language is processed. This text-based course takes you from foundational cognitive theories to the modern computational models used to simulate human-like language comprehension. You will build a deep theoretical foundation starting with core terminology, syntactic parsing, and cognitive resource limitations. What you'll learn: Understand the cognitive mechanisms behind real-time sentence and discourse comprehension; Analyze how human working memory constraints affect language processing and syntactic complexity; Evaluate symbolic and connectionist models of language processing; Resolve structural and lexical ambiguity using syntactic, semantic, and contextual cues; Explore the psychological reality of linguistic representations and modern neural network approximations. You will begin by mastering foundational terminology and cognitive architectures, then progress through structured readings that analyze real-time parsing strategies, constraint-based processing, and modern connectionist modeling techniques. This course is designed for beginners in cognitive science, linguistics, or artificial intelligence, requiring no prior background in psychology or programming. Start reading to uncover how minds and machines make sense of human language.