Ling 197a: Language Acquisition and Development

**front cover of Landau and Gleitman 1988 "Language and Experience: Evidence from the Blind Child"**
"Look up!"

Introduction

Linguistics is the science of human linguistic competence. Since we cannot observe knowledge directly, theoretical linguists collect language data, look for patterns, and propose formal theories of language knowledge that might explain why the data looks the way it does.

Psycholinguistics is a subfield of both lingusitics and psychology that studies how language learning, production, processing, and use proceed in the minds of language users. Psycholinguistics uses observation of natural linguistic behavior and experimental methods, in which people's behavior reveals the cognitive processes underlying it.

In this course, we will look at the language acquisition in children, examining their learning of the phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of their native languages, and considering the central debates in the theory of language acquisition.
Welcome to the course!

Requirements

There are several types of required assignments:

• Assigned readings - all readings are in the course reader, available from me – if we need to have additional readings, they will be posted on LATTE or distributed in class.

• Questions for assigned readings - as homework, prepare questions to be used during class discussion, and post them on the class blog before class

• Two quizzes (mini-midterms) - these will be take-home open-book quizzes, checking your understanding of the basic concepts covered.

• Community-Engaged Learning component: we will be collaborating with Tutoring In Public Schools at Brandeis, going to one of three schools TIPS is working with to assist the teacher in all classroom activities--from reading to a large group of students to helping individual students with their classwork. Students will contribute a minimum of 10 hours of participant observation work with children in the course of the semester; a diary of this experience will be necessary to collect data on children's language.

• Term research project, culminating in a presentation at a mini-conference at the end of the term, and in a term paper.
  The nature of the term project is flexible: you will do a literature review and critique, and then use your observations of children's language in local schools in conjunction with other data to investigate a particular open question in language acquisition and development.

Grading:

Schedule of classes

Part One: Big picture: what is the problem of language acquisition?
Tuesday, 1/13 Nature vs nurture, introduction
Friday, 1/16 The logical problem of language acquisition

Sign up for presentations, sign up for meeting with me, start thinking about project topics

• Gleitman and Newport 1995

• Pinker 1995

Tuesday, 1/20 NO CLASS - Brandeis Monday - catch up with readings!

Part Two: Acquisition of Phonetics and Phonology
Friday, 1/23 Language acquisition in utero

Last day to sign up for presentations

• Lecanuet 1998

Tuesday, 1/27 Speech perception and acquisition

• Miller 1991

• Maye, Werker, and Gerken 2002
  
  
  

Friday, 1/30 Speech segmentation; phonological production patterns

• Jusczyk 1999

• Ingram 1979

Part Three: Lexical Acquisition
Tuesday, 2/3 Biased learning of nouns

• Markman 1994
• Bloom 2001 (begin)

Friday, 2/6 Debates in noun/word learning

Meet with me to discuss project topic

• Bloom 2001 (cont'd)
• Hirsh-Pasek et al's comment. Naigles' s comment. Bloom's reply to these comments.

Tuesday, 2/10 Acquiring verbs

Meet with me to discuss project topic

• Gleitman 1990
• Pinker 1994

Friday, 2/13 Syntactic constraints on verb learning

Meet with me to discuss project topic. First take-home quiz [pdf]

Fisher, Hall, Rakowitz, and Gleitman 1994

Part Four: Morphology
Tuesday, 2/24 Learning regular and irregular morphology

Last day to meet with me to discuss project topic. First quiz due

• Pinker 1995b
• Yang 2000

Part Five: Acquiring syntax - various approaches
Friday, 2/27 Argument structure and verb learning
Topic and reading list due (4-8 articles).

• Goodluck 1991

Tuesday, 3/3 Argument structure (cont'd). Item-based approach to syntactic acquisition

• Cartwright and Brent 1997
• Tomasello 2000

Friday, 3/6 Other approaches to syntactic acquisition (cont'd)

• Fisher 2002 (a reply to Tomasello 2000)
• Saffran, Aslin, Newport 1996

Part Six: Sentence processing and sensitivity to structure
Tuesday 3/10 Sentence processing in adults and children

• Tanenhaus and Trueswell 1995 [handout]

Friday 3/13 Sentence processing (cont'd) & Structure sensitivity

• Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill and Logrip 1999
• Meroni and Crain 2003
• Crain and Nakayama 1987

Part Seven: Acquiring meaning
Tuesday, 3/17 Compositional semantics: adults and children
Research questions, pilot data, any revisions to reading list due

• Crain and Lillo-Martin 1999

Friday, 3/20 Acquiring quantification I

• Lidz and Musolino 2002

Second CEL diary check.

• Gualmini 2004
• Lidz et al. 2004

Friday, 3/27 Acquiring quantification II

• Hurewitz, Papafragou, Gleitman & Gelman 2006

Tuesday, 3/31 Pragmatics: theory of mind, implicatures.

• Papafragou, Cassidy, and Gleitman (to appear)
• background: Horn 2004 Implicature. Handbook of Pragmatics, Horn et al eds. Oxford: Blackwell
• Papafragou and Musolino 2003.

Part Eight: Bilingualism and second language acquisition. Instinct for language. Critical periods.

Friday, 4/3 Bilingualism and SLA
Introduction and background section of the paper are due (not more than 8 pages).

• Bhatia and Ritchie 1999, p.578 to p.614
• Omaggio-Hadley 2001 (perhaps a guest lecture on SLA by Prof.Irina Dubinina)

Tuesday, 4/7 Pidgins and Creoles
Second take-home quiz [pdf]

• Goldin-Meadow and Mylander 1998
• Senghas and Coppola 2001