Psych 156A/Ling 150: Acquisition of Language II

Tuesdays & Thursdays, 3:30pm-4:50pm in SSL 290
Instructor: Lisa Pearl, Department of Cognitive Sciences, SBSG 2314
Office Hours for Lisa: Wednesday 1:30pm - 3:00pm, and by appointment. Email is the best way to reach her to schedule an appointment not during regular office hours.

Course Reader: Liz Seward
Liz can be reached by email at

Announcements:

  • 3/30/10: Welcome to the class webpage! 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. Note that reference material 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.
  • 4/1/10: Be working on review questions for the introductory material and HW 1.
  • 4/6/10: Review questions posted for sounds & sounds of words. HW1 due 4/13/10.
  • 4/8/10: Material removed from the sounds & sounds of words review questions (we're skipping some material due to time constraints). We'll be finishing up material from lecture 3 in lecture 4, and so skipping some previous lecture 4 material. If you really feel deprived of the material we're skipping, you can access it in the reference material for session 4. ;)
  • 4/13/10: HW1 due. HW2 posted (due: 5/11/10, after midterm), review questions for word segmentation posted.
  • 4/15/10: Be working on HW2 and review questions for word segmentation. Please note that there was a typo in problem 4, which has now been fixed in the version of HW2 that is currently posted.
  • 4/20/10: Be working on HW2. Review questions posted for grammatical categorization. Midterm review in class 4/22/10 for midterm 4/27/10.
  • 4/27/10: No class 4/29/10. Read Pinker (1995) for class on 5/4/10. Review questions posted for morphology, along with first morphology lecture.
  • 5/4/10: Please pick up your midterm and HW1 if you haven't already.
  • 5/6/10: HW2 due on Tuesday. HW3 available, along with review questions for phrases.
  • 5/11/10: Review questions posted for poverty of the stimulus. Be working on HW3.
  • 5/20/10: Reminder - HW3 due on Tuesday 5/25.
  • 5/25/10: Please remember to fill out course evaluations for this class. :)
  • 5/27/10: HW3 will be returned 6/1/10. Be preparing for the final. Think about taking more language science classes in the future! :)

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.