This course focuses on the relationship between salience and information theory. Salient, relevant stimuli capture our attention, and the notion of salience has been widely employed in linguistics (e.g. perceptual salience in the visual world, semantic-pragmatic salience of referents, acoustic salience). A different line of research accounts for language comprehension using information-theoretic notions, such as predictability and surprisal. Salience accounts and surprisal accounts focus on different aspects of comprehension. Surprisal accounts focus on the comprehender's expectations about what will follow next: high prediction error is associated with high cognitive load. Salience accounts on the other hand are concerned with the comprehender's attention, goal and situation.

We will review recent literature from linguistics and cognitive science on these issues and discuss if we can capture salience effects resorting only to the notion of predictability, if attention can be reduce to prediction, and how the two are related.
The course is open to students with background in linguistics as well as students with background in psychology. The intention is for students to profit from the diversity of backgrounds and knowledge, through active discussion following the paper presentations.

Each week one or two students will pick one or two papers related to a topic or question, that they will present (20-30 min each presenter) to the rest of the group. The students can decide themselves on the focus of the presentation, based on the original research question and their interests. Each student will choose one or two papers that the rest of the class can read to prepare for their presentation. During the first few weeks we will hold regular meetings in the form of lectures, to lay the foundations that will help you understand the papers, and bring students with different backgrounds up to a common level of understanding. The students will also have to participate in a peer review session. More information on intent and purpose of the peer review form will be given during the introductory meeting.
MSc students can choose between a 4CP and 7CP version of the course. For the 7CP version, students additionally need to write a term paper. BSc students have to write the term paper.

The papers mentioned here are some pointers to get you started. You can choose one of these papers, but you're also free to suggest other papers. Please contact us if you would like to present something that's not on this list.

Some papers are paired with another one. This is because they are shorter / easier than the others and should be presented together by the same presenter.

Surprise