Psych 156A/Ling 150: Psychology of Language Learning

Tuesdays & Thursdays, 5-6:20pm in SH 134
Instructor: Lisa Pearl, Department of Cognitive Sciences, SSPB 2243
Office Hours: T/Th 3:30pm - 4:30pm.
Email is the best way to reach her to schedule an appointment not during these times.
Teaching Assistant: Tayopa Mogilner, Department of Cognitive Sciences
Office Hours: T/Th 10:30am - 11:30am in SST 687

Announcements:

  • 4/1/08: Welcome to the class webpage!
  • 4/3/08: This is a reminder that all assignments, readings, and lectures notes can be found by clicking on the relevant link in the schedule section. To access the readings, you need a username and password. Open the first set of lecture notes to get the username and password.
  • 4/5/08: Reference material subsection added to the schedule. This is not required reading. Rather, it's material that you can refer to if you want to understand more about what we covered in the lecture notes for that session. You will not be tested on any of this additional material, nor will you ever have homework questions that cover material in the reference readings that we didn't cover already in the lecture notes.
  • 4/14/08: Tayopa's office hours are now posted: T/Th 10:30-11:30am in SST 687.

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 normally-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.

We will be reading selections from several books, as well as articles. These can be found on the readings section and on the schedule.