Ling 151/Psych 156A: Acquisition of Language II

Mondays, Wednesday, & Fridays, 2:00-2:50pm in SSL 270
Professor: Lisa Pearl, Department of Linguistics & Cognitive Sciences,
SSPB 2219 & SBSG 2314
Office hours: Wednesday 3:00pm - 4:00pm in SBSG 2314
Email is the best way to reach her to schedule an appointment not during this time.

This class has a message board to facilitate communication about the course administrivia and content. Please go there first to see if someone has already asked your question before emailing the professor. It may be that your question is already answered there, and this will allow you to get a quicker response to your question.

Note: All assignments, all lecture notes, and most reference readings can be found by clicking on the relevant link in the schedule section. In addition, any reference readings that are password protected can be accessed by using the username and password found in the relevant post of the Discussions on the message board.

The material for the class that you are responsible for is covered completely in the course lecture notes, available (sometimes with accompanying podcasts) for download through the schedule section. However, reference materials are often helpful for understanding the material in the lecture notes, and will come primarily from the textbook, videos, websites, and short articles. Accompanying reference material for each lecture can be found on that day's "Reference Material" column in the schedule section.

Language is an incredibly complex system of knowledge. Not only are there multiple levels of representation -- sounds and words and phrases and meanings -- but within a given level, even simple output forms can be derived from multiple interacting pieces of knowledge. Yet as speakers of any given language, we are often blissfully unaware of how much we need to know in order to be able to communicate with language.

Nonetheless, this is precisely the knowledge children must acquire. And their task is not simple. The patterns of knowledge can be difficult to discern from the available input and, to top it off, the data children learn from is often ambiguous and full of exceptions anyway. Yet despite all this, all typically-developing children learn their native language nearly effortlessly, generalizing from noisy input in very specific ways. The degree of proficiency attained by very young children in their native language is almost never achieved by adults who are far more cognitively developed. How is this possible?

In this class, we delve into the process of language acquisition, exploring the way in which infants and very young children unconsciously uncover the rich systematic knowledge of their native language. We focus on both experimental methods and computational studies that quantitatively investigate the "how" of language acquisition.