Language and Computation advanced course:
Psycho-computational issues in Morphology Learning and Processing.

• Vito Pirrelli ()

By providing a comprehensive overview of current machine-learning, psycholinguistic and theoretical linguistic literature on the topic, the course is intended to answer the following questions. How are words singled out of their embedding input stream? How are they processed and eventually understood in working memory? Are morphologically complex words stored in long-term memory as a whole or are they rather composed "on-line" in working memory from sub-lexical constituents? Do formal regularity and morpho-semantic transparency play any role in this? Does word-level knowledge require parallel development of form and meaning representations, or do the latter develop independently at a different pace to interact only at later stages? To what extent does past knowledge affect on-line word processing? What principles govern this knowledge? Are they morphology-specific or are they rather based on brain memory structures generically devoted to the ordered activation of items in time? Do they capture local, syntagmatic relations among sub-lexical co-occurring constituents, or also enforce more global paradigmatic constraints over classes of such constituents in complementary distribution?