Psych 156A/Ling 150: Acquisition of Language II

Tuesdays & Thursdays, 2:00pm-3:20pm in HH 178
Instructor: Professor 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.

Teaching Assistant: Lawrence Phillips, Department of Cognitive Sciences, SBSG 2221
Office Hours for Lawrence: Monday and Tuesday, 12-1:30pm, and by appointment. Email is the best way to reach him to schedule an appointment not during regular office hours.

Announcements:

  • 5/29/12: A correction has been made to the Introduction to Language Structure lecture notes (specifically, some wording has been clarified to indicate that linguistic nativists are the ones who would believe in Universal Grammar). Please download them again to make sure you have the most up-to-date version.
  • 5/22/12: A correction has been made to the Poverty of the Stimulus II lecture notes (specifically, the Gerken (2010) results). Please download them again to make sure you have the most up-to-date version.
  • 4/3/12: 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 much of the reference material is not required reading (only the entries with * are required reading for the class). The rest of the material is something 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 the additional non-* material, nor will you ever have homework questions that cover that extra material that we didn't cover already in the lecture notes. Please note also that the first set of review questions (for the introductory material) and the first homework are available to be downloaded using the links on the schedule page.

    Additional note for mac users: You need to use Adobe Reader (rather than Preview) to see all the pictures in the pdf versions of the lecture notes. If you try to open the pdf version with Preview, you'll see some - but not all - of the images.

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.