Thursdays, 2-4:50pm in SBSG 2200
Instructor: Lisa Pearl, Department of Cognitive Sciences, SBSG 2314.
Office Hours: 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.
The quantitative study of language science often requires us to make use of electronic data sets, such as conversational speech transcripts, electronic databases of linguistic information, and the internet itself. Whether we're assessing the input for language development, designing experiment studies of language processing, or characterizing adult knowledge and usage, we often need to know something like "When and where does this language phenomenon I'm interested in appear in real life?"
So how do we get this kind of information? Fortunately, there are many tools available that can help us do this, ranging from software designed to manipulate specific kinds of electronic data to general-purpose programming languages that can be used to create programs that do what we want. The main part of this class focuses on acquiring a computational toolset, so that we can apply it to real-world language data sets in order to answer real-world language questions.
Sometimes we also might wish to create programs that represent cognitive processes, such as language processing or language acquisition. Knowing simple programming languages can help us create these kind of programs, as we translate the intuition behind a language process into a concrete set of steps for carrying this process out. When we can do this, we understand the process itself - and more importantly, how it might work in human minds - much better. As part of this class, we will learn how to create some basic cognitive models for language.
Announcements:
Note: Please remember that you are responsible for bringing your own laptop to class in order to download material and work through the exercises provided in the workbooks. This applies starting on the first class session March 31, so please be prepared.