JLP315H1

Psycholinguistics: Language Acquisition in Children

Psycholinguistics focuses on how language is learned, processed, understood, and produced by the human mind. Through a blend of theory and experimental evidence, the course examines how children acquire language since the earliest stages of development. Topics include infants’ abilities at birth, cognitive development, word-learning, phonological, syntactic and semantic development and conversational abilities. Students will engage with foundational research methods in language acquisition, including behavioral methods and child language corpora, and will critically evaluate how experimental findings inform theories of language development. By the end of the course, students will have a deeper understanding of how humans acquire their first language and how language learning interacts with other aspects of cognitive development. (Sponsored by the Departments of Linguistics and Psychology, but administered solely by the Dept. of Linguistics).