When & Where
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 11:00am-12:20pm in SBSG 2200
Instructor
Lisa Pearl, Department of Cognitive Sciences, SBSG 2314
Office Hours: Wednesday 4:00pm - 5:00pm, and by appointment.
Email is the best way to reach me to schedule an appointment
not during regular office hours.
This class also has a message
board on EEE.
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.
A bibliography of the articles we'll read and refer to can be found in the readings section, and all articles can be accessed through the schedule page (provided you have the class username and password).
Announcements:
All readings can be accessed using the username and password received in the first class session. (Check the "Other questions" forum of the message board to get it.) Of course, you can also always track down these articles yourself in most cases. Look to the schedule, and be thinking about what papers/topics you'd like to present to the class.
Before the first session, please make sure you have viewed the message board and posted your response for the first set of discussion points. (It's easy, I promise.)
Please also note that I will not be holding office hours on Wednesday November 11. Please email me to schedule an appointment if you need to see me that week.