Introduction to Psycholinguistics

(CGSC 496/696)

Spring 2002

Instructors:

Office hours: by appointment

Place: Gore Hall 320 Note: the labs on M March 11 and W March 13 will be in Pearson 116

Time: Mondays and Wednesdays 10:00 — 11:15

Course Goals

Psycholinguistics stands at the crossroads of linguistics, psychology, and neuroscience. The basic objective of psycholinguistics is to understand how the human mind/brain supports the learning, comprehension, and production of language.

This course provides a hands-on introduction to the state-of-the-art in psycholinguistics, covering the following general questions:

• Knowledge: What is the current state of our understanding of language learning and processing? This will be studied through readings, lectures and in-class discussions, and written homework assignments.

• Techniques: What experimental and analytic techniques have been used to learn these things? This will be studied over the course of a series of Lab Assignments, which will provide hands-on experience in designing and running experiments, analyzing data, searching databases.

Course Requirements

For all: In order to participate in this course, you are expected to:

• Attend the lectures and labs.
• Do the readings and formulate questions about them that you can ask during class time.
• Work in groups on the lab assignments
• Attend a visit to Roberta Golinkoff’s "baby-lab".

Additional requirements for graduate students (600-level):

• Present a paper to the class.
• Attend an additional meeting on ERPs + do work involved

1. Lab 1: Discrimination 15%
2. Lab 2: Childes 15%
3. Midterm: Acquisition10%, Discrimination 10%
4. Lab 3: TVJT 15%
5. Lab 4: Processing 15%
6. Final Exam: 20% (this will include questions about TVJT, lexical and syntactic processing, and language disorders)

For the graduate students, the class presentations will be factored in with the grade of the final exam.

The work on the lab assignments will be group work, however, be sure to write up your own report, and mention the group members you worked with. If your group decides to partition the work involved in a certain way, make sure to be explicit about who did what. Remember that each member of the group always shares the responsibility for the end product.

Schedule (subject to change!)

Times & Places

• Lectures: Mondays and Wednesdays 10:00 — 11:15, Gore Hall 320
• Labs will generally be in the same room, except for the labs on M March 11 and W March 13, which will be in Pearson 116.

Readings

Bibliography in BibTeX format (suitable for import into other bibliography software)

Introduction

W February 6:

Carroll, David W. (1994). Psychology of Language, 2nd edition. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole.

Problems of Acquisition

M February 11:

M. Bowerman (1988) " The ‘No negative Evidence’ Problem: how do children avoid constructing an overly general grammar?" In: Hawkins, J. (ed): Explaining Language Universals.

Past Tense

W February 13:

Pinker, S. 1995. Why the child holded the baby rabbits: a case study in language acquisition. In L. Gleitman & M. Liberman (eds) Language: An Invitation to Cognitive Science, Vol 1 (2nd edn.), 107-133.

Plunkett, K. 1995. Connectionist approaches to language acquisition. In P. Fletcher & B. MacWhinney (eds) The Handbook of Child Language. Oxford: Blackwell, 36-72.

Perception (Bill Idsardi)

M February 18:

Stager, C.L., Werker, J.F. (1997). Infants listen for more phonetic detail in speech perception than in word-learning tasks. Nature, 388, 381-382. [PDF]

W February 20:

Pegg, J.E., Werker, J.F. (1997). Adult and infant perception of two English phones, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 102 (6),3742-3753. [PDF]

Werker, J.F., Tees, R.C. (1999). Influences on infant speech processing: Toward a New Synthesis Annual Review of Psycholology, 50, 509-535 [PDF]

Infant Language Acquisition (Roberta Golinkoff)

W Feb 27, M March 4:

Hennon, E., Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff. 1999. "The extraordinary journey from fetus to language developing child". In H. Grimm (Ed) The German Encyclopedia of Psychology

Golinkoff, R.M., Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and M. Schweisguth. 2001. "The reappraisal of young children's knowledge of grammatical morphemes". In J. Weissenborn and B. Hoehle (eds.), Approaches to Bootstrapping: Phonological, Syntactic and Neurophysiological Aspects of Early Language Acquisition. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Roberta Golinkoff and George Hollich. 2000. "An emergentist coalition model of word learning". In Golinkoff et al (Eds.) Becoming a word learner. Oxford University Press.

Corpus Data — Early Syntax

W Mar 7:

Hyams, N. and K. Wexler (1993). "On the grammatical basis of null subjects in child language", Linguistic Inquiry 24 (3): 421-459.

M Mar 18:

Poeppel, D. & K. Wexler. 1993. The Full Competence Hypothesis of clause structure in early German. Language, 69, 1-33.

Language Acquisition (Gaby Hermon)

W March 20:

Crain, S. and D. Lillo-Martin 1999. An Introduction to Linguistic Theory and Language Acquisition. Blackwell Publishers: Oxford.

The Truth Value Judgment Task

M March 25:

Krämer (1998) "Children’s interpretations of indefinite object Noun Phrases; Evidence from the scope of negation" In: R. van Bezooijen and R. Kager (eds.) Linguistics in the Netherlands (1998), Amsterdam, John Benjamins.

W March 27:

P. Lloyd, and M. Donaldson (1976). "On a method of eliciting True/False judgments from young children" In: Journal of Child Language 3, 411-416.

S. Crain and R. Thornton (1998). Chapter 27 from Investigations in Universal Grammar: A guide to experiments on the acquisition of syntax and semantics, p 221-238. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.

M April 8:

Crain, S., Thornton, R., Boster, C., Conway, L., Lillo-Martin, D. and Woodams, E. (1996). Quantification without Qualification. In: Language Acquisition 5, 83-153. (Selected pages.)

Language Acquisition (Irene Vogel)

W April 10:

Vogel, Irene and Eric Raimy (to appear). The Acquisition of Compound vs. Phrasal Stress: The Role of Prosodic Constituents.

Processing: Lexical Access

M April 15:

Forster, K. 1990. Lexical processing. In D. Osherson & H. Lasnik (eds.), Language: An Invitation to Cognitive Science, Vol. 1 (1st edn.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Norris, D., J. McQueen, and A. Cutler. 2000. Merging information in speech recognition: Feedback is never necessary. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23, 299-370. Includes peer commentaries; read to p.325. [PDF]

Processing: Sentence Comprehension

W April 17:

Kimball, J. 1973. Seven principles of surface structure parsing. Cognition, 2: 15-47.

Tanenhaus, Michael K. and John C. Trueswell. 1995. Sentence Comprehension. In Joanne L. Miller and Peter D. Eimas (eds.), Speech, Language, and Communication. San Diego: Academic Press, pp. 217-262.

M April 22:

Boland, J. E., Tanenhaus, M. K., Garnsey, S. M., & Carlson, G. N. (1995). Verb argument structure in parsing and interpretation: Evidence from wh-questions. Journal of Memory and Language, 34, 774-806. [PDF]

Gibson, E. 1998. Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition, 68, 1-76. [PDF]

Processing: Sentence Production

W April 24:

Garrett, M. 1990. Sentence processing. In D. Osherson & H. Lasnik (eds.), Language: An Invitation to Cognitive Science, Vol. 1 (1st edn.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 133-175.

Ferreira, V. & G. Dell. 2000. Effect of Ambiguity and Lexical Availability on Syntactic and Lexical Production. Cognitive Psychology, 40, 296-340. [PDF]

Neurolinguistics: Aphasia

M April 29:

Swaab, T. 1998. Language and the Brain. Chapter 8 of Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind, by Gazzaniga, Ivry & Mangun. New York: Norton.

Swinney, D. et al. 1996. "Neurological Distribution of Processing Resources Underlying Language Comprehension." Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 8: 174--184.

Neurolinguistics: Functional Imaging

W May 1:

Segalowitz, S. and H. Chevalier. (1998). Event-related potential (ERP) research in neurolinguistics: parts 1-2. In: H. Whitaker (ed.), Handbook of Neurolinguistics. Academic Press, pp. 95-123.

Osterhout, L. and Nicol, J. (1999). On the Distinctiveness, Independence, and Time Course of the Brain Responses to Syntactic and Semantic Anomalies. Language and Cognitive Processes 14 (3): 283-317. [PDF]

M May 6:

Naatanen et al. 1997, "Language-Specific Phoneme Representations Revealed by Electric and Magnetic Brain Responses." Nature 385:432-434.

Pylkkänen, Liina, Andrew Stringfellow, and Alec Marantz 2001. Neuromagnetic evidence for the timing of lexical activation: an MEG component sensitive to phonotactic probability but not to neighborhood density. Brain and Language in press. [PDF]

Disorders: Williams Syndrome (Andrea Zukowski)

Impairment and Rehabilitation/Augmentative Communication (Beth Mineo)