Psych 150/Ling 155: Psychology of Language

Tuesdays & Thursdays, 2:00-3:20pm in DBH 1600
Professor: Lisa Pearl, Department of Cognitive Sciences, SBSG 2314
Office hours: Tuesday 11:30am - 12:30pm

Professor: Greg Hickok, Department of Cognitive Sciences, SBSG 2341
Office hours: Tuesday 3:30pm - 4:30pm

Email is the best way to reach them to schedule an appointment not during these times.

Teaching Assistant:
Lawrence Phillips, Department of Cognitive Sciences
Location for office hours: Wednesday 4:00pm - 5:00pm, Thursday 12:00pm - 2:00pm
Office hours: SBSG 2221

Email is the best way to reach him to schedule an appointment not during these times.


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 TA or instructors. It may be that your question is already answered there, and this will allow you to get a quicker response to your question.

Announcements:

  • 3/27/15: Lawrence Phillips will be our fabulous TA for the quarter.

  • 3/24/15: Welcome to the class webpage!
    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 on the message board under "Administrative Questions" and in the first set of lecture notes, which can be downloaded from the schedule section. Please note also that the first set of review questions (for the introductory material) is available to be downloaded and the first homework is accessible on EEE using the links on the schedule page.

    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, websites, and occasionally short articles. These can all be found on the readings section and the schedule section.

Language is an amazingly complex system of knowledge that all humans have and use without thinking about it (at least, if it's their native language), from sounds to words to phrases to sentences. All typically developing humans have managed to learn their native language(s) in a surprisingly short amount of time, and are able to deploy this knowledge to communicate with amazing rapidity, efficiency, and power. Moreover, all of this knowledge is embedded in the human brain, a distributed network of biological components that somehow operate in just the right way to allow us to know, learn, and use language.

In this class, we seek to use the tools of experimental psychology to investigate four broad questions:

(1) How do we define what knowledge of language is?

(2) How do we tell when and how language knowledge is learned?

(3) How do we understand how language knowledge is deployed in real time?

(4) How do we investigate how language knowledge, learning, and use is instantiated in the brain?

In exploring these questions, we will discuss a variety of linguistic knowledge types, including knowledge of phonology, the lexicon, morphology, syntax, and semantics.